Wrong Number
by Lynse
Summary: The Doctor receives a phone call, and it doesn't take him long to realize that it's the wrong number. But now, of course, the Doctor's curiosity is aroused, and he just has to investigate. Initially a one-shot, now continued.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: All right, I have clearly spent too much time with kids lately. Still. Standard disclaimers apply. In the interest of internal musings, this is set post-_Journey's End_ for the Doctor. As for _The Magic School Bus_, I'm not basing this on an episode, per se, but you know the bit at the end of the episodes, when all the kids all over the planet are trying to phone it? Well….

* * *

The Doctor had been wondering where he ought to go next when the TARDIS phone rang.

That made him grin. It ought to make the decision process easier. Someone wanted to chat, or for him to look into something, or maybe get some advice, or, ooh, perhaps someone wanted to invite him to a party. He was good at parties. Well, before the undesirables inevitably crashed it and he ended up sorting out whatever went wrong. That unfortunately tended to happen at parties he attended. Perhaps that why he wasn't invited as often as he might have been.

The ringing continued, and the Doctor picked it up, not bothering to see who was calling. Surprises were always better. "Hello?"

"Is this _The Magic School Bus_?"

"_What_?"

"Is this _The Magic School Bus_?" the voice repeated. A girl's. Young. Midwestern accent.

"Is this the—_what_?" the Doctor sputtered again, unable to believe what he was hearing. "The _magic school bus_?"

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "Suppose not," the girl said, sounding resigned. "Sorry. I'll try again."

"Nononononono!" the Doctor quickly cut in. "I was just…surprised, that's all. You got this number how, exactly?"

"Oh, I was just dialling random numbers," the girl responded, sounding happier now. "But I've got a bone to pick with you about the last episode." And before the Doctor could so much as open his mouth to let out another incredulous 'what?', she'd continued, "I mean, everyone knows aliens aren't real. I thought this show was supposed to be educational."

The Doctor blinked, and spared a moment to glance around him at what many would call his impossible time-space ship. Then, "Who says aliens aren't real?"

A laugh. "Oh, come on. It's not like they have any real proof. And they shouldn't be making stories around things that aren't proven. I mean, they have stretches in every episode, but aliens? That's just plain ridiculous!"

"Am I?" the Doctor asked, frowning a bit. "Suppose I have my moments. Then again, we all do, don't we?"

"What?"

"Look," the Doctor said, starting again, "everything doesn't need to have proof, does it?"

"It should when the point of the show is to teach kids things," the girl returned.

"Then what about teaching imagination?" the Doctor challenged. "Specifically, how _not_ to lose it. Because that's the trouble, you see. People grow up and they forget. Some don't, true, but most do. They lose that wonder, that curiosity, that sense that nothing's impossible, and they find themselves stuck in a world of which they can never see the entirety because nothing's left to ever drive them to _see_ it in its entirety."

Another pause on the end of the line. "I take it you assume that you haven't lost it, then."

"Aw, not much danger of that," the Doctor replied, grinning. "Seems that every time I think something's impossible, something else crops up to prove me wrong. Don't mind, really. Keeps me on my toes."

More silence. Then, slowly, "Are you one of the writers?"

"Me? Nah. I'm the Doctor."

"They need a doctor?"

He'd confused her. Oh, well. Bound to happen sooner or later. "Well," he reasoned, "even if you've got a magic school bus, you're not immune to scrapes and all sorts of those things. Not that I specifically tend to that sort of thing. I'd really rather do other things. I like being a doctor of other things. Well, other things not excluding that thing, which would really make me a doctor of everything, but—"

"Wait," the girl interrupted. "The magic school bus isn't real."

"Then why were you trying to ring it up?" the Doctor asked.

"I wasn't trying to phone _it_, I was trying to phone the producers, and…." Frustration now. "Look, I don't know why they need you around, but could you just ask them to make things more plausible for their next show?"

"Suppose I could, yeah," the Doctor agreed. "But you haven't managed to convince me that their last show wasn't plausible." He thought for a moment. "Or even," he added, "that the magic school bus itself isn't real. I've seen stranger things. Remind me, who's in charge?"

He didn't get an answer for such a long time that he thought she'd hung up. "Wouldn't you know that if you work for them?"

"Oh, I mean in the show," the Doctor clarified, not bothering to correct the girl's assumptions. The conversation was getting interesting, after all. "I haven't seen it for a while, you see." Or at all, actually. But it was sounding like it might, just possibly, be something that wasn't precisely what it seemed like.

"Ms. Frizzle, I think," the girl finally answered.

"And where's this show set?"

"Don't they tell you anything?" the girl asked, incredulous.

The Doctor shrugged, even though he was perfectly aware that she couldn't see him. "First day on phone duty," he confided. "Missed my briefing. You won't tell, will you?" Without giving her a chance to answer, he repeated, "So where's this all set?"

"Walkerville Elementary School, I guess."

"And where's that?" he asked, realizing even as he said it that the answer must surely be Walkerville, wherever that was.

"How should I know? It's not real."

"Oh, there you go off on that again," the Doctor said. "Is it so hard to just believe in things?"

A sigh. "Oh, you're just one of those nutters, aren't you? I got a wrong number again."

"_Well_—"

She hung up.

The Doctor sighed and did the same. Well, at least it wasn't a total waste. He had something to look into now, somewhere to go. Well, so long as the girl was wrong and it was real. Nothing he couldn't find out, though. He was really good at finding that sort of thing out.

What's more, 'magic' buses weren't entirely unheard of, not for him.

No matter. Even if it did turn out to be a fruitless search, it'd give him something to do.

And he needed a distraction now.

Besides, he had said he'd talk to the producer about plausibility. And that could turn into a really good conversation. He liked those. He didn't seem to have enough of them, for all his talking. His conversations were too often centred on explanations, or challenges, or warnings, or some random bits of fact about wherever he happened to be at the moment. Or something along those lines. He didn't have a lot of time to just talk.

He'd had a few good conversations on Midnight. And then things had gone a bit downhill. He'd never told Donna the half of it. He hadn't wanted to. He was glad he hadn't. But that had probably been the last time— No, no, he'd had a good barter with one of the shopkeepers on Shan Shen. Hadn't actually bought anything in the end, though. Not that time. He hadn't needed anything. He couldn't remember what tangent they'd ended up on, not now. It had been too long ago.

He was due for another good, long conversation for conversation's sake.

The Doctor grinned, and then he went to go find one.


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: All right, so after a surprising number of requests to continue this, and a good deal of thought as to how I would continue it, I finally am. Whether it turns out as you might expect it to is debatable, but we'll see. If all else fails, well, that first chapter can still just be read as a one-shot. Anyway, the story's set after _The Next Doctor_ for the Doctor (only because I'm not sure how much time there was between that and _Journey's End_) and after _Takes a Dive_ for Ms. Frizzle and her class.

* * *

The Doctor poked his head out of the TARDIS. He _might_ be in the right place. Bit hard to tell without actually checking the scanner. And, well, without knowing when that call had been from. But he'd given it his best guess—twice already. As they always say, third time's the charm. Well, that, and he'd learned a bit from the first two times when he'd been wrong, so, early 1990s, in Walkerville, which incidentally did exist. Well, if it didn't, he'd uncovered another impossible possibility. He did seem to run into his fair share of those. A planet orbiting a black hole was the least of it.

He was in a room. A rather messy room, and an empty one at that. Leaving the TARDIS nestled in what must have been the one bare corner in the room, the Doctor started poking around, finding everything from a suspension bridge composed of gumdrops, bobby pins, and floss up on one shelf to a shadowbox bracing a couple books against a computer. Of more pressing interest were the papers scattered throughout, occasionally in piles here and there. Some were drawings, but others looked suspiciously like scripts.

"Found you," he murmured, reading through a few pages. "Magic school bus indeed."

"Er…can I help you?"

The Doctor blinked and looked up. A man was standing in the doorway of the room, staring at him. He grinned easily, dropping the papers back on the table and pulling off his glasses, pocketing them and pulling out his psychic paper. "Yes, you can. I'm Doctor John Smith, but you can just call me the Doctor. I'm looking for the producer of _The Magic School Bus_?"

"Well, I'm one of them," the man answered, "so you're in the right place. What did you want?"

The Doctor kept the grin on his face, pleased that the man didn't jump right to the 'how did you get in here?' line of questioning. "A few things, actually. First off, I got a call from a girl not too long ago. Wrong number, incidentally. Wanted you. But it got me wondering, which is why I found my way here. Of course, she did request that I have a talk with you about plausibility. Seemed to think your show on aliens was too unlikely to be educational."

The producer frowned. "We haven't done an episode on aliens."

"Oh," said the Doctor, realizing that perhaps he had arrived too early. "Perhaps she was mixing it up with something else, then. Pity, really. I expect it would be interesting."

"We gave them an honourable mention in the first episode, exploring the possibility, and implied it in another episode, but nothing more," the producer explained. "We can't really build an episode around something that hasn't yet been proven."

"No, I suppose you can't," the Doctor agreed, remembering when he was. "Conventions and all that, isn't it? But surely you aren't denying the possibility."

The producer laughed. "Not me. Anything's possible."

"That it is. That it is." The Doctor glanced at the script he'd been looking at again and then turned back to the producer. "Your characters—"

"Are based on actual kids, yes," the producer agreed. "Valerie got the permission for it all."

The Doctor frowned, puzzled. "Valerie?"

"Frizzle," the producer clarified. "Ms. Valerie Frizzle."

"Oh, she's real, too, is she?" the Doctor asked, raising his eyebrows.

"Quite. And just as unbelievable as her character, let me tell you," the producer said with a laugh. "So I guess I should ask you: are your questions really for me, or are they for her?"

The Doctor considered this for a moment. He would have preferred to stay and chat, to have that good, long conversation he'd been looking for, but, like always, something seemed to spring up right away that just begged to be investigated. "Her, I suppose," he finally answered. "Do you know where I can find her?"

"I'll give you her address," the producer replied.

* * *

The house in question wasn't exceptionally out of the ordinary, but the Doctor knew that that was by his standards and that his standards didn't quite align with everyone else's standards of 'ordinary', though perhaps that was because he wasn't entirely convinced that ordinary could exist. It was a rather elaborate house, however, especially compared to those nearby. School bus mailbox, lizard fountain, bridge over a pond—those were just icing on the cake. The house itself, well—it wasn't brightly bedecked in lights, but it might as well have been with the attention it attracted. Or ought to have attracted; no one else seemed to blink at it, really, but perhaps they were used to it. Large and sprawling, housing numerous windows of unconventional shapes—from stars to portholes—and all sorts of odds and ends on the porch, including a giant thermometer, the house was one he rather liked, right down to the unique doorbell, which he rang by pushing the lever up to complete the circuit.

The woman who answered had ginger hair that lived up to her name—frizzy, even though she'd tried to control it by putting it up. Or perhaps she didn't try to control it at all. He couldn't really tell. He'd never bothered with any of that stuff. Even with all the time he'd spent with female companions, it had never rubbed off on him.

He, however, had stopped sporting question marks in recent years, though that's not to say that he didn't occasionally consider dragging out one of his old jumpers for old time's sake.

Ms. Valerie Frizzle, it seemed, wouldn't have minded in the least if he had indulged himself. Her dress was covered with question marks, and she wore question mark earrings, and they would have made quite the pair if he'd met up with her a few regenerations ago.

"Yes?" she asked cheerily, reaching over to disconnect the doorbell.

"I was…wondering if I could ask you a few questions," the Doctor said. "Ms. Valerie Frizzle, isn't it? I'm the Doctor. Doctor John Smith. I was told you're the best one to speak to about the, er, _The Magic School Bus_ show."

"Were you, now?" she asked brightly. "Very well. You'd best come in, Doctor."

No 'Smith' appended to his name. She was quick. "You're not here to complain about the stories, I hope."

"Oh, no, no." The Doctor shook his head. "Of course not. Just wondering how far you…stretch things."

"The truth, you mean?" she asked, leading him to a room full of enough bits and bobs that it would nearly—_nearly_, but not quite—put some of the rooms in the TARDIS to shame.

He sat down on a hand-shaped chair, and she sat opposite him in a butterfly one. "Yes," he confessed, thinking that he might as well be succinct at least once or twice in this lifetime.

"Well, I suppose there are some embellishments on the story from time to time," she admitted with a laugh.

"But the bits about the magic school bus?" the Doctor prompted.

A smile. "Why not come and find out for yourself, Doctor? I'll expect you at ten tomorrow. My classroom is easy to find, I assure you."

The Doctor blinked. "What?"

"Ten of the clock? Tomorrow? That will give me time to wrap up yesterday's lesson and introduce you." She paused. "You aren't busy, are you? You can be a guest lecturer."

"A _what_?"

The school teacher smiled again. "Well, you can't be a doctor and know nothing, can you? You can give a presentation to the class."

The Doctor stared at her. Then, snapping out of his shock, he nodded. "All right, then. What are you studying?"

"Oh, all odds and ends," she replied. "We're discussing mysteries tomorrow. Hence the question marks." She made a vague gesture at her clothing.

"Ah," the Doctor said. "Yes. Right then. Mysteries. I can do that." He thought for a moment. "But you'll give me an indication of where the discussion has been going when I come in, yes?"

"Of course," she answered.

"And you're _certain_ there isn't anything specific you want me to talk about?"

"You can prepare whatever you like," she assured him.

Well. He wasn't asking so he could _prepare_ something. He didn't want to have to go to all that trouble. How often did things go off as expected, anyway? Preparation was a nice thought, but while it helped some people, it didn't seem to help him as much as it ought to. Some things worked, yes. He was starting to learn which ones. But other things, he knew, would happen no matter how much he prepared, and preparing never seemed to help in the slightest, so he didn't bother with it much anymore. Well, that, and he was usually distinctly lacking time _to_ prepare, and having it handed to him was unexpected. He didn't really know what to do with it.

Well, no, that was a lie. He did know what he was going to do. Find out what's fact and what's fiction, for one. If he could. Sometimes, he'd learned, the two were inseparable. One and the same, as strange and contradictory as that sounded. But that's how his life went, after all. Strange and contradictory and impossible, enough to boggle the mind and become something that seemed purely imagined, but real and true nonetheless. Even if some parts of it were difficult.

And lonely.

But that was fine. Just fine. Perfectly fine. He didn't need anyone.

Well. Yes, he did. Donna had been right. He probably did need someone. But he wasn't about to put anyone else in danger.

Still. Even if he didn't intend to take anyone on as a companion, it didn't mean he had to be a complete hermit. He could still associate with people, couldn't he? Keep doing everything he'd been doing for oh so many years? No reason not to.

So, mysteries. Yes. That was good. Perfect. The mystery of the magic school bus. Easy.

"Brilliant," the Doctor said with a grin. "Ten o'clock it is."


	3. Chapter 3

The Doctor arrived at the school a bit before ten and decided that it might be in his best interests, just this once, to find out precisely where Ms. Frizzle's classroom actually was. It was better than wandering about and trying to find it on his own, since while she had told him he wouldn't have much trouble finding it, she'd still neglected to say where it was. He started looking for the office so he could ask where he ought to go when he ran into someone who clearly worked there. He seemed nice enough, so the Doctor asked where he could find Ms. Frizzle.

"She's teaching right now, I believe," the man answered. "If you care to follow me to the office, you can leave a message for her there."

"Oh, no, no message," the Doctor said. "I'm a guest speaker."

This clearly surprised the man. "Guest speaker?" he repeated. "She didn't clear this with me."

"Well, it was a bit short notice," the Doctor explained. He paused, tugging on his ear, and ventured a guess. "So you're the principal, then?"

"Principal Ruhle, yes," the man confirmed.

The Doctor grinned. "Principal Ruhle," he repeated. "Oh, I like that. Perfect name you have for the job, Mr. Ruhle. But, yes, terribly sorry that you weren't informed. Just an oversight, I'm sure. I'm the Doctor, by the way." He grabbed the principal's hand and shook it. "Pleased to meet you. But, I'm due to speak in about five minutes, so if you could just point me in the right direction?"

Mr. Ruhle opened his mouth, hesitated, then closed it and shook his head. "Turn left at the end of this hallway. It'll be the third door on your right."

"Brilliant. Thank you," the Doctor said, starting off.

"May I ask what you're speaking on?" Mr. Ruhle called after him.

The Doctor turned back for a moment. "Mysteries," he replied.

Before he could turn away again, Mr. Ruhle asked, "Which one?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Don't know yet. That'd defeat the purpose a bit, wouldn't it, if I knew ahead of time? Makes it a bit of a mystery for me as well. Much more genuine." And without giving the principal a chance to comment, he spun on his heels and started off again.

A few short minutes later, he found himself standing outside the classroom door. He listened for a moment, took a guess at the number of children, and then walked in to see if he was right. Eight surprised faces greeted him. He looked at Ms. Frizzle, wondering why she hadn't said anything to them, and then he remembered that not knocking would have been rude and that perhaps that was what had surprised the children. Right. It wouldn't do to be a bad influence. He'd have to watch that.

"Hello!" the Doctor said cheerfully. "Sorry to interrupt, but I believe you're expecting me?"

"Of course," Ms. Frizzle replied, smiling at him. "You're right on time. Class, this is the Doctor. He'll be speaking to us today about mysteries." Perhaps she hadn't informed them beforehand after all. No matter. Mysteries and surprises went hand in hand often enough in his experience, though the surprises weren't always what he would call pleasant ones.

"Doctor?" asked one girl in the front. "Doctor who?"

The Doctor grinned. "Oh, it's just the Doctor. Very appropriate for the topic today, don't you think? Mysteries! I love a good mystery. But, I have to admit, it might be a _little_ bit easier for me if I knew all your names. We'll start with you." He looked pointedly at the girl who had wondered aloud about his name.

"Wanda," she said. The others spoke up their names in turn—Ralphie, Carlos, Dorothy Ann, Arnold, Phoebe, Keesha, and Tim. Oh, and there was Liz. He mustn't forget about Liz. She looked smart.

Dorothy Ann raised her hand. "Oh, don't bother with that," the Doctor said, waving at her to put her arm back down. "We'll have more of an informal discussion. What did you want to say?"

"If it's just the Doctor," she said, sounding much more hesitant than her classmate, "how do you want us to address you?"

"Just that way," the Doctor said. "Precisely that way. None of this 'sir', if that's what you're thinking. There's a time and a place for that, and this isn't it. I'm all for being polite, really, and treating your elders with respect, but with me, I'd just prefer to be the Doctor. Any other questions?" Nothing. He turned back to Ms. Frizzle, "So," he said, rocking a bit on his heels, "what's today's mystery topic?"

"I believe that was up to you," Ms. Frizzle answered.

"Oh." He'd really thought she would've picked one, based on whatever they'd been discussing in class. It was highly unlikely they'd been discussing something he didn't know anything about. No matter; children were full of questions about things. He could ask them. "What mystery would you lot like to know a bit about? What's puzzling or inexplicable or just plain mysterious and begging to be known?"

In the babble that erupted—maybe he _shouldn't_ have specified that they dispose of raising their hands—he caught suggestions ranging from the Bermuda Triangle and the Nazca Lines to the Loch Ness Monster and the source of vampire legends. He might've even heard someone ask about the 1666 fire in London, but he thought that unlikely and decided he'd imagined it, piecing it together from the torrent of words that had hit him.

Or perhaps Ms. Frizzle had mentioned it, since when he'd glanced at her she'd had a particular gleam in her eye—though he couldn't be certain that it hadn't been simply because he'd gotten just what he'd asked for and more besides.

Well.

Even if she had, he was certainly going to do his best to ignore it. That fire had not been his fault. Well, not any more than the one in Rome, at least, and he still maintained that he wasn't the cause of that one, either.

"What happened," the Doctor asked, still rather surprised by the suggestions he'd received, "to 'why is the sky blue'? Or maybe, 'where're the bees disappearing to'?" _Donna_ had been asking the last one, and she'd found out, even if she didn't recall the answer now.

"But we know all about that," one girl—Keesha?—said. "We know how light works, and we've learned about bees." There were several nods of agreement, and the Doctor decided not to point out that it was highly unlikely they'd learned what _he_ knew about the bees. Then again, this was over a decade earlier. It might not be as noticeable a problem yet for the general population. Certainly not a concern for a class full of, what, eight year olds?

Then again, he wouldn't have expected a class of eight year old humans to ask him about so many things that would still be puzzling to them when they were old and grey. They were asking things he couldn't tell them the answer to, whether he knew it or not. He'd better give them some guidance, then, and steer the line of questioning down a different path. "I could give you a better lecture if you choose something that's _not_ still an unsolved mystery," he reminded them. "Otherwise, the best I'll be able to give you is a summary of all the speculations and facts and the oddest accounts recorded. I was thinking more along the lines of something that's just a mystery to you, not the entire planet."

One of the boys snickered and leaned over to whisper to his friend. "Guess you can't ask him about aliens, then, huh, Ralphie?"

The Doctor grinned. "Well, I wouldn't say that. If we're going to discuss something that hasn't been confirmed at this point and time, then that's a topic I'm awfully knowledgeable about, if I do say so myself."

"So you think they're real?" Ralphie asked.

"Oh yes," the Doctor agreed. "Very much so. As real as you or I."

"Too bad Janet's not here," the one boy said—Carlos, the Doctor remembered finally. "She'd demand proof."

"She out sick?" the Doctor asked.

"She's my cousin," replied Arnold. "She's not in our class; she's just spent the day with me a few times. She's a bit of a know-it-all. That's why she wants proof for everything. I meet her at lunch sometimes, unless we're on a field trip."

Ah, the magic words. Well, providing that part was more real than most would think. "Do you go on field trips often?" the Doctor asked casually. The children exchanged looks, finally nodding, and Arnold admitted that the first time Janet had been with them, they'd gone to the planetarium.

He might miss an awful lot of things, but the Doctor certainly didn't miss the fact that a good deal more had gone on on that particular field trip than the children were admitting. He should really have tried to track down a few episodes to watch. If there was a script regarding that particular field trip, it hadn't been one of the ones the Doctor had seen in the producer's office.

"If you don't mind my asking, Doctor," began Phoebe after a few seconds, "how is it that you can know an awful lot about aliens when we don't have any proof that they're real?"

Oh, he should've expected that question. Telling them the entire truth would take a bit long; he'd be better off with the usual lies of omission. After all, that was only what they were trying to do to him. It— Hold on, she'd changed the subject. He'd been all set to ask about their trip to the planetarium, and she'd gone and changed the subject on him. Well, to be fair, she'd changed it back to the original topic, but she'd still gone and changed it…. No matter. He could get back to it.

"Well," the Doctor answered, "what's proof, really? What can you take as _proof_? Someone's word? Something you see with your own eyes? A photograph? A bit of film? What constitutes itself as proof is debatable, isn't it? I mean, I could say that I've stood in the same room as an alien—as an entire roomful of aliens, even—but that's not proof. I could show you a picture of an alien, but that wouldn't really be proof, either. People sometimes try to call something alien when it's really not."

"Like calling an inflatable monster a real monster," Wanda said. "Something that seems like proof might just be a hoax."

"Quite right," the Doctor agreed, although in his experience, hoaxes were passed off as the real thing about as often as the reverse was true.

"But you didn't answer Phoebe's question," Tim pointed out. "How do you know so much about them? Have you studied proposed alien encounters?"

"You could say that," the Doctor allowed carefully. "I've an awful lot of experience however you put it. Enough," he added pointedly, "to convince me that aliens most definitely _do_ exist."

"So do you have proof that they're real?" Ralphie asked, sounding hopeful.

The Doctor grinned. "I have all the proof _I_ need."

"Can you show us?" This was from Keesha, her voice a mix of scepticism and healthy curiosity.

"Well," the Doctor said, stuffing his hands into his trouser pockets and bouncing on his heels, "that'd depend on whether you're willing to see it. To open your eyes and really look." He paused, glanced at Ms. Frizzle, and added, "And, well, providing we have time for a little trip."

A smile split Ms. Frizzle's face as she nodded, her earrings catching the light of the windows and flashing. "To the bus, everyone!" she crowed.

Over the resulting pandemonium, the Doctor was the only one to hear Arnold groan, "At least it'll be a _normal _field trip."

* * *

A/N: And they're off…. But what they're bound for is another question, one that I'm not quite convinced the Doctor even realizes the answer to yet. Anyway, thanks to those who've taken the time to review.


	4. Chapter 4: Arnold

"It's going to be a normal field trip," Arnold repeated to himself under his breath as they boarded the bus and took their seats. "It's going to be a normal field trip. It has to be. We're not going to be turned into animals or insects or water vapour or eaten alive or baked or frozen or shrunken down to the size of molecules or anything like that."

"With the Frizz?" Wanda asked, leaning up from behind him. "No way!"

"But the Doctor—" Arnold protested weakly.

"She probably knows him," Tim reasoned. "He could be a friend of hers."

"Or a relative," Phoebe suggested.

"Yeah," Carlos agreed. "And did you see his sneakers? They're more scuffed than mine, and these are the same ones I wore a couple million years ago."

"The late Cretaceous Period was 67 million years ago," Dorothy Ann corrected. "Besides, you can't judge a book by its cover."

"Phoebe might be right, though," Keesha said. "I mean, Ms. Frizzle didn't say we couldn't go on a field trip, and she invited him here in the first place. And the Doctor's not like the other grownups; he's more like Ms. Frizzle."

"You mean he's weird," Carlos said, laughing.

Keesha frowned at him. "I mean he's different. The only people Ms. Frizzle has invited on our field trips are her relatives—like Murph. Mr. Ruhle didn't believe us when we were telling him about being inside the egg, and all Ms. Molly Cule really knows about is the mega magnifier, and she's known Ms. Frizzle for ages. Even Mr. Junkett doesn't know about the magic school bus, and we used it to save him. So if the Doctor knows…."

"But does he really know anything?" Phoebe asked. "This trip was his idea, not Ms. Frizzle's. Maybe Arnold's the one who's right. Maybe it really is just going to be a normal field trip, like the ones at my old school."

"A normal field trip?" Ralphie asked. "About aliens? Are you kidding?" He looked at the Doctor, who was examining the mishmash of controls at the front of the bus with childish glee, still grinning. He probably hadn't stopped since they'd left the classroom. "Besides, I'm with Carlos. The Doctor's weird."

It was a while before Ms. Frizzle gently reminded the Doctor that they couldn't find what they were looking for if they never left, and the Doctor reluctantly took a seat at the front, right behind Ms. Frizzle. He kept asking her questions about the bus and didn't blink an eye when she told him about mesmoglobbers and plonthoisters and plengdabbers and how hard it was to find a good mechanic these days, though she recommended Radius Ulna Humerus if he had any trouble. They seemed to get along quite well, and they were halfway through town before Arnold realized he didn't know where they were going. A quick round of questions confirmed that no one else did, either. DA, who was sitting right behind the Doctor, touched his shoulder and asked him when he looked round.

"To the planetarium, of course!" the Doctor replied. "Can't learn about aliens without some sort of context." He must have seen the confusion on their faces—and in some cases, disappointment—because he added, "Well, yes, old hat, I suppose. Seen one planet, seen them all? That's not what you think, is it? I should hope not."

"No, it's not," Dorothy Ann said, rummaging in her backpack, "but I thought—" and here she pulled out a newspaper rather than one of her usual books "—that the planetarium was closed for repairs. Electrical shortage, causing a small fire in the main gallery." She handed the Doctor the paper.

"Oh, dear," the Doctor said, scanning the article. "That's unfortunate."

Arnold swallowed. He was getting a bad feeling, the sort of feeling he usually got when they were going to go on a field trip. This _was_ a field trip, yes, but it wasn't the usual sort of field trip, and he'd been hoping it would stay that way. Now, he wasn't so sure it would.

His fears were confirmed by the Doctor's next words, addressed to Ms. Frizzle: "I don't suppose we could nip off anywhere else to see the planets?"

Arnold didn't have to see Ms. Frizzle's face to know that there was an excited glint in her eye. "Seatbelts, everyone!" she shouted, throwing down one of the levers at the front.

When the Doctor didn't seem to find the fact that their school bus had become a space shuttle and that they were now in outer space at all unusual, Arnold was forced to agree with Carlos and Ralphie. The Doctor was definitely weird.

He was also looking directly at him. "This the planetarium you went to with your cousin?" the Doctor asked casually.

"The other one was closed," Arnold mumbled.

"Well, why don't you tell me about your last trip, so I don't repeat anything by mistake? No need to learn things twice over, is there, so long as you remember what you learned before?"

Definitely weird. Calling the Doctor 'highly unusual', as he'd claimed Ms. Frizzle's field trips were when Janet had been pressing him, before she'd come along with them that first time, didn't cut it. He didn't seem at all shocked as Arnold relayed, with the help of the others, the story of their trip across the solar system, detailing everything from Janet's collections of proof to losing Ms. Frizzle to what had happened on Pluto.

The Doctor was frowning when they'd finished. "You _littered_?" he asked, aghast. "As if messing up your own planet wasn't enough, you had to litter on _Pluto_?"

"It wasn't intentional," Arnold said, defending his cousin. "Well, not really. It just…. It didn't fit, and Janet couldn't take it back anyway."

"It didn't fit," the Doctor repeated. "So you _left_ it. On Pluto." He started muttering to himself before finally saying, "You know what? We'll have to forget about aliens. You lot don't need a lesson on the unknown; you need a lesson on leaving things as you found them. _Littering_," he said again, sounding disgusted. "Typical humans."

"Hey, we recycle," Wanda said. "We know what would happen if we didn't, and how much we get out of doing it. We know it's the right thing to do."

"Sure you do," the Doctor shot back. "On Earth. But on Pluto? Oh, no, too much trouble. Couldn't be bothered to take it all back where you found it."

"Arnold was frozen!" Phoebe exclaimed, shocked.

"Well, he thawed out well enough, didn't he?" the Doctor asked. "And a nice bit of technology you'd need to manage that without any damage. Let me tell you, with what you would've needed to do that, he would've lasted however long it would've taken to put things back in place, and clearly you have that technology, even if you shouldn't, so that's just a poor excuse." Before they could protest any further, he turned his attention back to Ms. Frizzle. "Any chance we can get to Pluto before its classification as a planet is revoked?"

"Hit it, Liz," Ms. Frizzle said. Before Arnold could blink, Liz had hit one of the buttons and the bus had become a spaceship akin to the one it had been when they'd set off to look at stars for DA, and they were manoeuvring through the asteroid belt and coming up on Jupiter. He could see its big, red spot. The storm.

"What?" Dorothy Ann asked, sounding shocked. She pulled out one of her books and consulted it as she continued, "What do you mean, have its classification as a planet revoked? According to my research—"

"Don't mind me; just babbling," the Doctor interrupted. "Your research is right." Under his breath, but not quietly enough that no one else could hear, the Doctor added, "Until 2006, at least."

"What do you think he means by that?" Phoebe asked in a whisper, leaning across the aisle to Tim.

Tim shrugged. "Maybe he knows something we don't. Scientists might be reconsidering Pluto's status, and if they are, it could be years before they make their decision. Maybe he thinks that's when it will be settled."

"You're close," the Doctor said—apparently, they hadn't been speaking quietly enough, either. "The debate's out on the actual definition of a planet. I just have the feeling that once that's settled, Pluto'll be nothing more than a rather large space object in the Kuiper belt. Well, and a dwarf planet, but it would only be the second largest that they know of right now, so it won't really be anything special anymore."

The Doctor stopped for a moment, letting them think about this, and then added in a rather reluctant voice, "I'm sorry I was rude before. I don't usually realize when I am. You're right, Phoebe. Arnold was frozen. You couldn't have known that he wasn't in much actual danger if you got him into the right conditions immediately, which I imagine Ms. Frizzle did, given what the rest of you have told me."

Looking at Arnold, he added, "Plus, there's the fact that you didn't come out of it with anything worse than a cold, one which didn't even originate on Pluto, from the sounds of it. Some of those viral strains have a nasty tendency to turn you blue. Or purple. Funny thing, those viruses. Their replication technique produces a rather lot of anthocyanins. Strange little evolutionary quirk, that one. Never did figure it out.I mean, viruses telling cells to produce plant pigments? Even _I_ can't guess how that one came about."

The Doctor paused, just slightly, and returned to the topic at hand when Arnold didn't say anything. "_Any_way, you probably caught your cold the minute you ended up back on Earth. Weakened immune system; you're lucky you didn't catch worse." Another pause, and the Doctor was addressing all of them again, saying, "But, yes. With the conditions Arnold had been under, since by all appearances they were the proper ones, he could've stayed that way for years without any real damage. Not that I would recommend it; you lot don't know enough to go about experimenting with cryogenics. Best you stick with trying to freeze tissue in liquid nitrogen for the time being."

They'd reached Pluto now, touching down not far from where they had last time. The bus had remembered the way. It was just as dark and cold and desolate as it had been last time, with Janet's pile of stuff sitting exactly where she'd left it. Arnold could see all of it from here. The rocks from Pluto and Venus, the meteorite from Mercury, the ice blocks and red dust from Mars, a jar of red gas from Jupiter's red spot—even the asteroid that had gotten them into this mess, the one Janet had lassoed when she was supposed to be out helping Ms. Frizzle fix the map. Arnold didn't regret sitting on her to make sure she couldn't delay them further in their search for Liz and Ms. Frizzle. They might not have made it to Pluto otherwise.

It wasn't long before all of them were suited up and outside. The Doctor didn't seem to take as much glee as the rest of them bouncing along the planet's surface, not like Arnold would have expected. How could he keep a smile off his face the first time he stepped foot on another planet?

Come to that, how could anyone not blink an eye at any of this?

And what had he been going on about earlier, talking about viruses that turned a person blue? He'd been orange once, when he'd eaten too many Seaweedies, but he couldn't picture anyone being blue. Or purple. The Doctor had said the virus could turn people purple, too. He'd thought orange had been bad enough. He couldn't imagine being purple.

The Doctor had borrowed Ms. Frizzle's mega magnifier and was now scrutinizing the various items in the pile. "What's he looking for?" Carlos asked. "Moon dust?"

"Traces, actually," the Doctor replied, handing Ms. Frizzle's magnifier back to her, "but it looks clean. You're lucky. Interplanetary items are usually screened for a reason, you know. Don't want to transfer a nasty bug from one place to the next by mistake."

"Like when you go through customs and they ask what you've brought with you?" Tim asked. Arnold remembered that his aunt and uncle had just come back from overseas somewhere. Tim had brought a carving they'd given him to show the rest of the class the last time they'd had show and tell. Well, the last time they'd had a normal show and tell, at least.

"Precisely!" the Doctor agreed, all enthusiastic again. He stopped, reconsidered, and then added, "Well, sort of. Near enough for our purposes, anyway. Most of the screening techniques are a bit more advanced than that."

"But interplanetary travel?" Wanda asked, incredulous. "You can't mean—"

"Sure I can," the Doctor interrupted. "I can mean anything I like. Come on, now." He gestured at the pile that had been Janet's proof of her first field trip with Ms. Frizzle. "There's proof right in front of you that interplanetary travel is possible. And, you're on Pluto; that makes you aliens."

"That doesn't count," Keesha protested. "We're all from Earth. We might be aliens here, but we're not to ourselves."

"Yeah," Ralphie agreed. "Aren't there any Plutonians or something?"

"If there were," the Doctor returned, "don't you think they would've done something about this ugly blight you left on the surface of their planet?" Ralphie opened his mouth to respond to that, but the Doctor cut him off, grinning as he did so. "Well, actually," he said, "they live on the other side of the planet. Aren't much in terms of explorers these days, those Plutonians. They might not have noticed if it hasn't been too long."

"You mean we managed to keep them in the dark?" Carlos asked, eliciting a few groans from his classmates.

"You could say that," the Doctor allowed, grinning a bit. "But we can't go searching for aliens until we've cleaned up."

"So we can?" Ralphie asked, brightening despite the task ahead of them. Arnold knew exactly how heavy some of that stuff was. Janet had made him carry half of it. "Ms. Frizzle, can we really?"

Ms. Frizzle chuckled. "As my great aunt Enigma used to say," she began, "you can't solve a mystery if you don't look for clues in the first place."

"We never got to look for aliens at my old school," Phoebe commented.

"I don't have any books about aliens," Dorothy Ann said, turning around to look at the landscape. "There's no real research back on Earth."

The Doctor overheard her. "Sure there is," he said.

DA looked understandably confused. "There can't be," she protested. "We'd know they exist for sure then, and we don't."

"Of course we do," the Doctor said. "That's what this is, isn't it? Opening your eyes to the proof that's already in front of you. But there are loads of books back on Earth. All you need to do is look for them and be willing to see them for what they are."

"Like what?" Ralphie asked.

"Oh, plenty of things. _Star Wars_: true story, barring a few minor details here and there. _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_: based on a true story. Loosely. They had some things right and took an awful lot of literary license with the rest. And then there's—"

"But that's all science fiction," DA protested. "Those stories aren't real."

The Doctor jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Magic school bus," he said. "I was told that wasn't real, and yet here we are. Don't be so quick to judge. The best scientist in the world isn't worth his salt unless he keeps an open mind." He gave them all another grin and then added, with a nod at the pile, "So, I sort and you load?"

"I should have stayed home today," Arnold muttered, getting in line between Phoebe and Tim. Various ice blocks and Venusian rocks and everything else was passed from student to student until it reached Ms. Frizzle, who cheerfully loaded everything into the bus. By the time they were finished, the load looked considerably smaller than it had been when it had first burst out of the bus doors, even considering the pile of Plutonian rocks that remained outside. Ms. Frizzle could evidently pack better than he could. Arnold supposed it shouldn't surprise him; in the past, Ms. Frizzle had managed to pull all sorts of things out of her pockets that he never would have guessed could have fit in there, and she'd burst out of places he would've thought too small for even him to fit into. He knew he shouldn't underestimate her.

He wasn't sure about the Doctor, who had just declared that they were finished. "What about the jar?" Arnold asked before he could stop himself.

The Doctor looked at him quizzically. "What jar?"

"Janet put some of Jupiter's red spot into a jar," Arnold said.

"Oh, that jar," the Doctor said. "Don't worry about it. It's safe. I've got it."

"Where?" Carlos asked, looking him up and down.

The Doctor grinned. "Right here," he said, producing the jar out of nowhere and showing it to them. "See?"

A smile split Carlos's face. "Wow. You're a magician, too?"

"I'm a bit of everything," the Doctor replied. "Have to be, don't I, if I can walk into a classroom and let you pick the lecture topic? I _need_ to be an expert in everything, including the art of illusion." The jar vanished again, and the Doctor led the way back the bus. Ms. Frizzle was already in the driver's seat, waiting, doors open. It wasn't until the Doctor popped the helmet off his suit once inside the bus doors that Arnold realized there was something wrong with that.

"Hey, DA," he said, "there's no air in space, right?"

"That's right," she answered.

"Then how come—?" Arnold gestured at the Doctor.

Dorothy Ann looked, frowned, and scrambled for her books. She pulled one out of her bag, flipped through it, read a passage, and looked up again, looking completely perplexed. "Outer space is a vacuum," she said. "Not a perfect one, but…. But all the air should've been sucked out. With the doors open, the environment can't be stabilized. That's not possible." She sighed and put her book back. "Or maybe it is. The Doctor's right; I have to keep an open mind. It's probably something the bus did."

Arnold followed her onto the bus, thinking. Her explanation made sense. It really did. It even seemed to fit. The bus had heat shields, so it could have an oxygen shield or whatever would keep the air in. Just because they hadn't used it before didn't mean anything. Maybe Ms. Frizzle had gotten some the last time she'd gotten the bus fixed. Or maybe the Doctor—

But that was ridiculous. The Doctor was just a guest speaker. He just happened to be a really weird guest speaker who knew something about everything and didn't seem at all surprised to learn about a magic school bus and who already believed that aliens existed.

Arnold sighed. This wasn't a normal field trip, and he was willing to bet that the Doctor wasn't anything nearly as normal as one of Ms. Frizzle's relatives or old friends, let alone an ordinary guest speaker. He didn't know who the Doctor could actually be. He wasn't sure if he wanted to know. He just…. Why was it too much to ask for a _normal_ field trip for once?


	5. Chapter 5: Ralphie

The bus moved a bit slower than usual, being burdened as it was with all of Janet's stuff. To Ralphie, it felt like it was taking ages to get there. The Doctor had directed them to the other side of the planet. He was going to show them Plutonians. They were going to see real, live aliens.

Ralphie was the first one out of the doors when the bus stopped. It was even darker on this side and colder still. When everyone had clambered off the bus, they all set about looking around, except for Liz and Ms. Frizzle, who were checking the bus to make sure it wasn't overburdened with the load. At least, that's what Ralphie assumed. He didn't really know.

It wasn't long, however, before they all arrived at a very disappointing conclusion: there was nothing here.

The Doctor was frowning. He picked up a few rocks, borrowing Ms. Frizzle's mega magnifier again to get a closer look. He'd also pulled out a little tool of his own and was pointing that at various things. DA had asked what it was, and the Doctor had muttered something about sonic screwdrivers before going off about something else, so Ralphie had figured that now was not the time to ask why the Doctor had lied to them, letting them get their hopes up before dashing them.

It was funny, though. He'd looked as surprised as the rest of them to find nothing. Heck, he looked genuinely concerned that there were no traces of whatever he was looking for. Then again, Ralphie wasn't so sure he was all that good at reading facial expressions, though he knew as well as anyone that the Doctor's were certainly expressive enough.

"They _should_ be here," the Doctor said when Ralphie finally asked where the aliens were supposed to be. He kept looking around as if he would suddenly see something he'd missed before. "I mean, they're here for a while yet, even if they are wiped out before the Usurians set up The Company."

"What do you think he's talking about?" Keesha whispered to Tim. She received a shrug in response.

"Something's not right here," the Doctor said. "We should go to Mars. You didn't stop anywhere between here and Mars, did you? I don't recall seeing any ice from Saturn's rings or any such thing."

"Janet had driven the bus down to get the gas from Jupiter's red spot, but that was it," Arnold answered, looking uncomfortable. Ralphie figured that was because it was his cousin who'd nearly gotten them lost in space.

"Why Mars?" Ralphie asked as they all started climbing back onto the bus.

"Well, for one, you've been there," the Doctor replied. "There were loads of ice blocks and buckets of red dust. Very telltale. For another, if the Plutonians are gone, I need to see if other races are gone, too."

"You mean we get to look for Martians?" Ralphie pressed.

"Well, there aren't likely to be many signs of the Ice Warriors. It'd be far easier to try to find an Osirian pyramid."

"A what?"

"An Osirian pyramid," the Doctor repeated. "The Osirians built them, not the Ice Warriors. Big, easy to see. If they're there, like they should be, we won't miss them."

"But how do you know that?"

"I told you, I know quite a bit about aliens." The Doctor grinned. "Believe me, I've spent _years_ studying them."

"But you were wrong about the Plutonians."

"Well, yes," the Doctor allowed, "and while I have been known to make mistakes, I shouldn't have made one now. It's not really a mistake. They should have been here." And before Ralphie could ask any more questions, the Doctor turned away and began to talk to Ms. Frizzle in a low voice, probably asking questions of his own.

"Find anything out?" Carlos asked, leaning up to talk to him.

Ralphie shook his head. "Not really. Either the Doctor's right and we've had aliens for neighbours for years without realizing, or he's making it all up."

"Like you were when you made _your_ supposed broadcast?" Keesha asked, joining their conversation.

"This is different," Ralphie argued. "He promised us real aliens. If he was lying, why didn't he just say we couldn't go looking for them? Why go and pretend they were gone? It doesn't make sense."

"Ms. Frizzle did say that you had to look for something to find it," Tim said from his seat beside Keesha. "Maybe we have to look harder first."

"We can't have looked harder," Wanda said. "We were overturning stones as it was, and the Doctor even used the mega magnifier."

"Maybe the Doctor was just mistaken," Phoebe suggested.

Ralphie shook his head. "No, he says there's something wrong. He says we should have found them. No one who's mistaken makes up stories, Phoebs. Besides, he says we're supposed to go to Mars next, to look for a pyramid."

"A pyramid?" Carlos repeated. He smirked. "Maybe we'll find a mummy. After spending so many years wrapped up in a tomb, I'm sure she'd like us to help her unwind."

"Come on, Carlos," Keesha said. "There's not actually going to be a pyramid any more than there were Plutonians or anything else. Besides, shouldn't we be going to Jupiter first? There was that bit of red spot Janet got, wasn't there?"

"Yeah, but the Doctor kept it," Arnold reminded them. He glanced over at Dorothy Ann, who was currently buried in one of her books. "Do you know what's in it, DA?"

DA chewed on her lip for a moment, then flipped forward a few pages and skimmed over the words. "According to my research," she began, "Jupiter is composed of ninety percent hydrogen and ten percent helium, with traces of other elements." She looked up. "The red spot's a storm, and it moves slightly over Jupiter's gaseous surface, but there's no reason it would be made up of anything different than the rest of the planet."

The conversation continued for a while longer, but Ralphie wasn't paying too much attention to it. He was still trying to figure out the Doctor. He knew they'd been right to peg him as weird. There was no question about that. But even though Ralphie knew the Doctor had to be lying to them, he had to admit that it didn't really _feel _like he was being lied to. The Doctor didn't _act_ like he was lying to them. But maybe lying was too strong a word. Maybe the Doctor was just humouring them. Adults did that a lot with kids, humouring them. Ralphie didn't usually mind so much, but this was different. He'd hoped that the Doctor was being serious, but he wasn't, and that was disappointing.

And Ralphie didn't really want to admit that, either. That would just be embarrassing. He had a feeling he might have invested a bit more hope in this whole alien thing than anyone else had.

"We'll just drop the asteroid off here," the Doctor said to Ms. Frizzle. They were passing through that asteroid belt again. Ralphie thought it had a name, but he couldn't remember it and didn't feel like asking DA. She was busy looking up something else again.

Ms. Frizzle slowed to a stop and looked back at the Doctor. "Need any help?" she asked.

The Doctor grinned. "I'll enlist a bit, yes." He turned around and looked directly at Ralphie. "Would you mind?"

"No, of course not," Ralphie said, getting up, though in truth he was wondering why the Doctor had picked him.

The answer became clear when they were in the back, hoisting up the asteroid to be thrown out a hatch in the back. Ralphie had to admit that either the asteroid was a lot lighter than it looked or the Doctor was a lot stronger than he looked, because it wasn't that hard for him to move it on his end.

"You're right to be inquisitive, you know," the Doctor commented, sidestepping a few blocks of ice that had tumbled from the top of the pile. "It's good to challenge people when they need challenging. Makes life interesting."

"Yeah," Ralphie mumbled in agreement, though he didn't really have anything to say.

"I used to ask loads of questions," the Doctor continued. "Still do, in fact. You can never go wrong asking questions. Well, unless you ask the wrong questions and can't get out of all those consequences, but I'm getting rather good at that by now, I imagine." He paused, shifted the weight of the asteroid, and then twisted around to open the hatch, which Ralphie then realized was the first of two, allowing for a sort of airlock. The two of them put the asteroid down and then the Doctor ushered him back through the first hatch. The Doctor turned his attention to the control panel by the hatch for a moment, and once the asteroid was gone, the Doctor turned back to Ralphie. "Of course," the Doctor continued, easily picking up their conversation again, "it does help if you ask the questions you really want the answers to, and I'd guess that you've been keeping a few of those to yourself. Now's as good a time to ask as any, isn't it?"

Ralphie shifted on his feet, then said, "You're just humouring us, aren't you?"

The Doctor blinked. "Come again?"

"You didn't really mean it," Ralphie said. "With this whole thing about aliens. You didn't mean it."

"Of _course_ I meant it!" the Doctor exclaimed. "Why wouldn't I? I mean, I'll admit I've told a lie or two in my time, but I've no reason to lie about that."

Well, he did look indignant. Ralphie swallowed but held his ground. "Then what about the Plutonians?"

The Doctor shook his head. "No, I've already said, something's wrong there. We really should have noticed something. But we didn't. There wasn't a trace. That's highly suspicious, if you ask me. Everything leaves traces. I try to clean up enough of my own as it is, and whenever someone stumbles across something I've missed, oh, well, believe me, we should have found something."

"So what if we don't find anything on Mars? No pyramids or whatever else?"

The Doctor blew out a breath. "Well, we'll return the rest of the stuff in here, for one, and I'll try to figure out what's gone wrong." He looked troubled for a moment. "I mean, yes, you don't usually see the proof of extraterrestrial life that's right in front of you, but that's because you don't know what you're looking for half the time. Even when you have some of the pieces, you don't know how to put it together." He paused, then said, "Let's put it this way. Do you know anything about asteroids?"

Ralphie nodded, recalling the time they'd melted a comet after mistaking it for an asteroid that was on a path that, without intervention, would have been a collision course with Walkerville Elementary. When they'd found the real asteroid, they hadn't been able to melt it. It had been made up with metal and rock, not ice.

"So you know that they tend to contain water? Ice, rather," the Doctor clarified.

Ralphie frowned. "They're rock, not ice."

"Well, yes, on the outside," the Doctor said, "but that doesn't mean there's not any water on the inside, does it?"

"I guess not," Ralphie admitted.

"And that asteroid we just released back into space," the Doctor said, nodding his head in the direction of the hatch, "probably contained amino acids, which in turn would be found on the meteorites that break off that asteroid." Perhaps seeing the blank look on his face, the Doctor hurriedly continued, "Amino acids make up proteins. They're about as much the building blocks of life as atoms are the building blocks of matter."

"Water and protein, then," Ralphie said. "You mean that if some of the pieces are there, the rest are probably out there, too, and there's a chance that there was the right mix somewhere else besides Earth."

The Doctor smiled. "Quite right. I mean, you'd get more than just the amino acids on the asteroids. You're going to have more kinds of organic matter than that. Soluble organic matter, insoluble organic matter, that sort of thing, meaning it can be classed as to whether it dissolves in water or not. You see, it's all mixed up inside that hunk of rock, as you said, and different pieces that break off contain different things, but if you get the right kind of mix in the piece that breaks off, and it falls in the right place at the right time, well, anything can happen. You can get the ingredients for primordial soup."

"For what?"

"Primordial soup," the Doctor repeated. "You know, the mix of amino acids and various elements and—no? Well, it's just a theory for you lot, anyway. You get your amino acids, the right chemicals, a bit of energy into the system, and a good deal of luck, and you might just get the right proteins to start it all. Life, that is." The Doctor paused, then added, "Point is, then, that if you have what you need, and you're lucky enough to get the right conditions, well, it's possible, isn't it?"

Ralphie thought on this for a moment. He wanted to agree. He really did. But he just…. "Is that all you need for proof?" he finally asked, remembering the Doctor's earlier words. "To believe that aliens exist?"

"Well, I thought it might help you a bit," the Doctor said, avoiding the question, "seeing as you strike me as the type of person who's quite willing to believe, or at least that you _think_ you're quite willing to believe, but really you're not, not if you need the proof in the first place."

"I don't mean to be," Ralphie said. "It's just the last thing I believed in didn't turn out to be true, either. I had it all wrong."

"Well, I'm still going to say that aliens are quite real if you ask me," the Doctor said, "but may I ask you what you believed in before?"

He shouldn't have brought it up, but he didn't have a choice now. "Vampires," Ralphie admitted. "You know, with the vampires turning into bats and all that. Bats aren't at all what I'd thought they were."

"I imagine not, given the tales you would've been reading," the Doctor said, "but that doesn't mean vampires aren't real. Well, vampires in so many words. I mean, every legend has a grain of truth buried in it somewhere. Still, haemovores and plasmovores and the like are about even today, though that's not to say that vampires like what _you're_ thinking of never actually existed, either. That lot descended from the Great Vampires. Mind you, you shouldn't need to worry about any of that. Unless you get one on the run, they should bypass Earth. Well, if they're smart."

Ralphie stared at him. "You're not making that up, are you?"

"That? Nah. If I'm going to make up stories, I'd…. Well, you know, I'm not quite sure what I'd say. It'd be much easier for me to tell you about something else that's out there." The Doctor waved a hand around in a vague gesture at the hatch and the space beyond it. "Loads of things out there, Ralphie. All waiting to be discovered. Real things, not just imagined ones. If you knew the wealth of what's out there, you wouldn't need to ask about stories."

Ralphie opened his mouth to say something to that, but the Doctor had already started back to the front of the bus. He closed his mouth, but he couldn't help but wonder at the implications of the Doctor's words.

Earlier, the Doctor had said that he had all the proof he needed to know that aliens most certainly existed. He'd said that he could say that he'd been in the same room as an alien, meaning he'd met one, if he wasn't lying, but he claimed he had no reason to lie about that. And then to say he wasn't making up stories, that there was plenty waiting to be discovered out there, somewhere, and about not needing to ask about stories if you already knew the truth, well….

Maybe he did know it.

Maybe he wasn't just humouring them.

Maybe there were pyramids on Mars, built by Osirions or whatever. Osirians. That was it.

Except, wasn't Osiris an Egyptian god of something? Sun or death or something like that? No, Ra was the sun god, so Osiris was the god of the underworld. That had to be right. Ralphie could only remember the two of them, but he'd liked that unit when they'd done projects on different cultures. The Mayans and the Aztecs and the Egyptians and the rest of them. It had been interesting.

And, apparently, informative.

So maybe the Doctor was humouring them after all.

But why make up something as silly as pyramids on Mars? The Doctor had even said they'd be big, easy to see. Something they wouldn't be able to miss unless they weren't there to begin with. And when they weren't, like the Plutonians weren't, the Doctor would claim that something else was wrong. And he'd probably do the same on Venus and Mercury, and then they'd go back to Walkerville without having even seen an alien, or even any proof of one.

It was disappointing.

But, maybe, just maybe, it was part of the Doctor's lesson. Whatever his lesson was. That some mysteries couldn't be solved, maybe. That some things just remained unknown. That sometimes all the searching you could do wasn't enough to find the answer, or the proof, or whatever you were looking for. Maybe he was trying to say that you had to believe that you'd find something eventually so that you would keep searching until you did. Because if you didn't search, you never even had a chance of finding it.

That was probably it. It made sense. You can't find something you don't look for. Isn't that what Ms. Frizzle's great aunt had said? You needed to look for clues before you could solve the mystery. Or something like that.

Well, Ralphie did want to know that there was other life out there somewhere, so he'd look for clues. If the Doctor thought there might be some sign of a pyramid on Mars, he'd help them look for it. After all, even if he didn't find the answer he was looking for, he was bound to learn something along the way.


	6. Chapter 6: Wanda

"Come on, you weasley wimps!" Wanda called, bounding out of the bus. She didn't think it would take _too_ long to unload everything, but she wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. The prospect of exploration always piqued her interest, even if it was just exploring another part of someplace she'd already been, as was the case now.

The hardest part was lifting the ice blocks out of the bus. Getting rid of the red dust had been as simple as dumping the buckets, since it hadn't mattered where the dust had landed. For some reason, however, the Doctor had insisted that they scatter the ice blocks. It was no good, he'd said, to stack them neatly. Things had to look as natural as possible. After all, he'd pointed out, it wouldn't do to have someone notice them and think that they'd discovered the work of aliens when it was really their doing.

Personally, Wanda found it doubtful that anyone would think that about a pile of ice blocks any time soon if they hadn't found pyramids that were already on Mars, as the Doctor had claimed, but she figured she might as well withhold her judgement for the time being. After all, the Doctor was the one who said he was an expert, though whether he actually was or not, Wanda wasn't quite sure. The lack of proof made her wonder.

But then again, she reasoned, he might have gotten mixed up on Pluto. If he was promising them pyramids on Mars, the Doctor had to know what he was talking about. There was bound to be something here.

When they finished unloading the bus, everyone gathered around the Doctor again. He glanced at Ms. Frizzle, who smiled and nodded to him, and then addressed them, saying, "If I'm right, and I'm very rarely not, then we _should_ find an Osirian pyramid just over that ridge." He pointed behind them.

"And what if you're not right?" Tim asked.

"Well, then we try behind _that_ ridge," the Doctor said, spinning around to point in the opposite direction, "but I'm fairly sure my initial calculations were correct. If we don't find anything, it's not going to be because I miscalculated."

"No," Keesha muttered as they started trudging towards the first ridge, "it's going to be because he's making it up."

"It might not be intentional," Phoebe offered. "He might believe we're going to find a pyramid."

Keesha snorted. "Does he _look_ old enough to be going senile?"

"Some people are just…eccentric," Phoebe said.

"You mean weird," Carlos chipped in. "Face it, Phoebs. The Doctor's not like any guest speaker you might have had at your old school. He's a Frizzle Special."

"I think he's trying to prove a point," Phoebe insisted.

"What point?" Wanda finally asked. "What's the point of leading us on one wild goose chase after another?"

"I don't know," Phoebe admitted, "but I'm sure that he has a reason."

If there was a reason for it, Wanda didn't have a clue what it was. There were no signs of any pyramids over any ridge, whichever one they looked over. Unless the Doctor's point was that they needed to stretch their legs, he wasn't making a very good point about anything. He definitely wasn't making a case for the existence of aliens, which is what he was supposed to be doing. If anything, Wanda was even more doubtful than she had been before this entire thing began.

If there were any aliens out there, they certainly weren't hanging around here. Maybe in the next galaxy over or the one after that or something, but not here. Definitely nowhere as close to Earth as Mars.

Maybe the Doctor was just trying to teach them a lesson about littering. Maybe he'd given up on the whole alien thing altogether and was just pretending to keep on it so that they didn't complain.

But even that still didn't explain the whole claim about pyramids on Mars. Honestly, if he was going to make something up, it had to be more believable than that. She'd figured that one out long ago, though the only times she got away with it were when her mother was too busy with work or with William to pay too much attention to everything she was saying.

Still, she'd gotten the impression that the Doctor was smarter than that. He ought to know that they wouldn't believe him if he made ludicrous claims and couldn't show them any proof. Then again, when they'd asked him what proof he had, he'd never really answered, had he? He'd just said that he had all the proof he needed, and that all the proof he could offer them wasn't really proof because it was just his word.

Ralphie sat down next to her when they were back on the bus, so Wanda asked, with a nod at the Doctor, "Do you believe him?" Ralphie was, after all, the one who really believed in aliens, or at least more so than anyone else in the class. As far as she knew, at any rate. She figured most of them were like her, thinking that aliens might exist or they might not and doubting that they'd ever find out otherwise.

She'd thought, shortly after meeting the Doctor, that she might find out, but she was forced to revise that opinion now.

"I don't think he's crazy," Ralphie said, "if that's what you're asking."

Wanda frowned at him. "You know what I'm asking."

Ralphie shrugged. "Yeah, I suppose I do."

"You suppose you do what, know what I'm asking or believe him?"

"Both, I think. I'm not sure."

"How can you not be sure?"

"I'm still trying to figure it out," Ralphie said. "The Doctor's really, really smart. He's at least as smart as Ms. Frizzle. They both really know their stuff, and they know a lot about everything. So I'm not sure. I can't figure out whether he's serious or whether he's just humouring us. Maybe Phoebe's right. Maybe he's just trying to teach us a lesson and we haven't figured out what it is yet."

"At this rate, we're not going to figure it out. We're just going to be hauling a bunch of rocks and stuff back where we found them." Wanda let out her breath in a huff. "Unless that _is_ his lesson, but I get told to clean up after myself and William often enough that I don't need to be told here, too."

When nothing turned up on Venus or Mercury and they were headed back to Earth with the rocks and meteorite dutifully returned, Wanda really had to wonder whether tidying up and not littering had been the Doctor's lesson after all.

It still seemed like a far cry from proving that there was life on other planets.

The Doctor, who had become increasingly concerned since Pluto regarding this lack of proof, was now addressing them in a loud voice from the front of the bus. He wasn't apologizing, or at least Wanda wouldn't call it apologizing. He kept saying that something was wrong, that they should have found something, somewhere. He admitted that he might miss one thing, maybe even two, but certainly not everything. The lack of substantial proof, he said, was proof itself that something, somewhere, somehow, had gone terribly wrong, and he just needed to find out what it was and fix it.

It was somewhat belatedly that he asked if they would mind helping him, and he seemed cheered to find out that they wouldn't mind at all.

Of course, he shouldn't have expected any other answer. As far as she was concerned, this field trip couldn't be over. They hadn't done what they'd set out to do. They might be headed back to Earth, but it wasn't, necessarily, giving up. They were just collecting more information and gathering their thoughts and figuring out a plan of action. Planning, Wanda had learned, generally did help.

Under normal circumstances, at least.

When they arrived back at the school, entirely too early for their trip to be what Wanda figured was a proper field trip for Ms. Frizzle's class, the Doctor sent them on into the classroom to sort out what they knew and what they didn't while he had a chat with Ms. Frizzle. Wanda didn't have to look far to see that she didn't have the only glum face at this prospect. It would be different if this was a challenge, but it wasn't. They already knew they didn't know anything. Talking about that wouldn't change it.

"What we should do," Wanda announced when all the kids were gathered in the classroom, "is figure out the real mystery here."

"What's the real mystery, the Doctor's lesson plan?" Carlos asked, smirking.

Wanda shook her head. "No, I mean the Doctor himself, not his stories."

"But his stories," Tim pointed out, "might tell us more about him."

"Yeah," Keesha agreed. "Let's get the facts. What do we really know about him?"

"He's British," Carlos said. "You can tell from his accent."

Keesha shook her head. "My grandmother can mimic an English accent. For all we know, he is, too."

"We know that he's 'just the Doctor'," Dorothy Ann offered. "That's all he ever told us."

"He definitely believes in aliens," Ralphie said, "and everything he's told us about them."

"And he doesn't like littering," Arnold added.

There was silence for a few seconds, and then Tim said, "He doesn't answer a lot of questions. He changes the topic more often than he gives a direct answer."

Wanda nodded, adding, "And have you noticed what he mumbles under his breath? He's smart, but half the things he says don't make sense. The whole thing about Pluto and Plutonian viruses, for one. Or us being typical humans."

"Yeah, he seems to take pride in being atypical," Keesha said.

"You mean weird," Carlos corrected.

"No," Keesha argued, "I mean what I said before. He's like Ms. Frizzle, not like all the rest of the adults." She paused, then relented, "All right, maybe he's a little weird."

"But he is clever," Phoebe said, "so I'm sure he had some reason for our field trip besides returning everything that we'd left on Pluto. He didn't come to talk to us about aliens, after all. He came to talk to us about mysteries. That's what he'd said before, wasn't it, when he didn't tell us his name? He said it was because it made everything seem more mysterious."

"He kept the jar, too," Arnold added, looking as if he'd suddenly remembered it. "The one with Jupiter's red spot in it. We never put that back."

"What would he want that for?" Wanda asked. She looked at Dorothy Ann again. "What did you say it was again? Hydrogen and helium?"

DA nodded. "Those were the major elements. But I don't have any idea why he'd keep it."

"He probably doesn't even know," Wanda said. In her opinion, the Doctor seemed rather scatterbrained. Not to mention a bit crazy, the way he kept going off on things. How were they supposed to learn something from him if he couldn't explain himself properly? How could they learn about the possibility of alien life if he sidelined their fieldtrip to clean up what he called a bit of litter? She knew as well as anyone the value of putting things back, especially considering what happened when she hadn't and she'd lost things, but it wasn't like the stuff had been doing any harm on Pluto anyway.

No matter. Phoebe had a point. The Doctor was supposed to be talking to them about mysteries. So long as they didn't know anything about him, he was a mystery to them. Just like he wanted it to be. To prove his point. Well, mysteries were meant to be solved, weren't they? They could solve it. They could figure out who the Doctor was, beyond being weird and smart and crazy and possibly British.

Taking charge, Wanda started telling her classmates exactly what she figured would be their best course of action for handling the mystery the Doctor had handed them.

The best way to learn, after all, was to do. That's one thing they'd all learned from Ms. Frizzle. Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy. They might not be getting messy yet, but they were certainly taking a chance, and they'd probably make mistakes, but that was the only way to learn. If they never took the chance of making the mistake, they'd never get any closer to solving the mystery.

And what was the point of a good mystery, after all, if you never even tried to solve it?

* * *

A/N: Well, that turned out to be a rather disappointing field trip, didn't it? But the field trips, of course, are just the means to the lessons. The lessons themselves are what are truly important.


	7. Chapter 7

"It wasn't a wild goose chase, you know," the Doctor said to Ms. Frizzle, "no matter what the children think."

"Oh, I'm quite aware of that, Doctor," Ms. Frizzle replied, smiling.

The Doctor looked surprised. "Really?"

Ms. Frizzle laughed. "Of course. You knew too precisely where to look for something that others won't admit exist."

And, the Doctor thought, she had a magic school bus. Somehow. He couldn't expect her to be entirely ignorant. For all he knew, it _was_ alien technology. But, well, it didn't _seem_ like alien tech, and he'd seen a lot of different kinds. No, this was…something else. More of a conglomerate, he suspected. Not entirely alien technology, but not necessarily wholly without it, either. He needed to examine it to be sure of anything.

That in itself was a tad unusual. He usually had a stronger suspicion than this.

"How'd you wind up with this particular beauty, anyway?" the Doctor asked offhandedly, patting the side of the bus.

Ms. Frizzle's smile grew. "We all have our secrets, Doctor. If you can keep yours, I intend to keep mine."

All right, so that's what he got for asking outright. Things never were that easy. "May I at least examine her?" He didn't know whether Ms. Frizzle anthropomorphised her school bus, but his car had been Bessie, and the TARDIS was, well, the TARDIS, a wonderful old girl without whom he'd have been forced to live quite a different life, so he was used to relating to feminine personalities in what others mistakenly thought were mere pieces of machinery. Maybe it was because they were both temperamental, though the TARDIS was noticeably more so than Bessie had ever been, perhaps because she really was alive, but he wasn't quite sure.

"By all means," Ms. Frizzle replied, and the bus obligingly popped open her bonnet.

The Doctor shrugged out of his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, but he didn't see anything out of the ordinary when he examined the bus's inner workings. In fact, it was all exceedingly ordinary. Ordinary and usual and normal and dull, all without a hint of the extraordinary capabilities he'd witnessed.

The Doctor's frown deepened. Not even a sign of a plonthoister.

He closed the bonnet and turned back to Ms. Frizzle. "All right," he admitted, "that's better than I would have thought in this day and age, I'll grant you that. You keep your secrets very well. But I _know_ there's more to this than meets the eye."

"I never said there wasn't."

The Doctor stared at her for a moment, and then it all clicked into place. "Oh," he said. "Oh, that's clever. That's very, very clever." He patted the school bus affectionately. "That's how it works, doesn't it? All of it. The bus, your field trips, the wild goose chase I unwittingly led."

Ms. Frizzle didn't say anything, but he could see the twinkle in her eye.

"You can see it if you believe in it," the Doctor continued. "All those kids of yours might have _wanted_ to believe me, to believe all my tales of aliens, but that's not the environment they've grown up in, now is it? You've been showing them science, using the power of their imaginations and yours to do it. But me, I tried doing things differently, didn't I? I asked for faith first, for them to trust in my words when I'd as good as told them that I didn't have any more proof than my word."

Ms. Frizzle smiled at him. "They took you at your word, Doctor. Can you blame them for that?"

The Doctor sighed. "Not really, no. But it's a proper shame, isn't it? Young imaginations, so vibrant, so alive, and yet blinded by the world they've grown up in. They acknowledged the possibility, nothing more. They might yearn to know that there's more, but already they're searching for proof. They're not satisfied with speculation. Already." He looked towards the classroom window, taking a moment to watch the students who would grow up and forget, folding truths into fictions, adventures into stories, impossibilities into imagination.

It didn't have to be that way. If it had to be that way, no one would be any different. But knowing that these children had been given an extra chance and would still, in all likelihood, call their treasures of childhood mere fancy and play, was terribly disappointing.

Equally so was the knowledge that this particular adventure could have turned out differently still. "You could have dropped the shield," the Doctor said. "You could have let them _see_." They'd all been caught in it, that shield. They'd all willingly had the wool pulled over their eyes. Even him, until he'd realized what was happening, and not just when it came to chasing after aliens. He'd been going about finding out the truth about this magic school bus in entirely the wrong way, too.

"I wasn't going to take away something I never put up," Ms. Fizzle replied quietly. "You know as well as I that preconceptions and doubts and disbelief can construct a far better shield than anything I could do through the bus. You were trying to get them to break through the boundaries, showing them the limits and daring them to step past them. I could do no more than encourage them to take the opportunity to do so, and you know that quite well, I imagine. They needed to take that final step by themselves."

"They would have done so if you were the one leading them to it instead of me," the Doctor said. "They trust you. You're their teacher. I'm just a stranger to them. They still don't know what to make of me."

"Few do."

"True enough," the Doctor conceded, "but you can't deny that they would have opened their eyes, that they would have really looked like they'd needed to, if I hadn't been the one to ask them to do it. With me, it was all too easy for them to overlook things, to discount what's simply impossible because they've never seen it before. That's too much like me, ignoring all those little clues or looking too hard and missing something that's right under my nose. They ought to remember not to do that, discounting either the impossible or the everyday things."

"Then teach that lesson," Ms. Frizzle said simply. "Show them the value of doing what you say."

After a moment, the Doctor asked, "Why did you invite me here? You asked me to come here to speak. Why?"

"Why ever not?"

"No," the Doctor said. "No, don't do that. Don't. Just listen, and answer properly. You didn't question me. When I came to you full of questions, you didn't ask any of your own. Why not?"

"I'm a teacher, Doctor. I'm used to questions."

"Do you have the answers?" the Doctor asked, raising his eyebrows.

"Sometimes," came the reply, "and sometimes you already have the answer, and all I need to do is let you look for it."

"I don't need a lesson," the Doctor complained. "I'm not one of your pupils."

"Perhaps not in so many words," Ms. Frizzle agreed, "but if everyone can learn from everyone else, we're all pupils, aren't we? And I wouldn't have thought you would turn down a lesson, Doctor, for we're never too old to learn new ones or be reminded of old ones. Wouldn't you agree?"

Well. She did have a point. Part of the reason he kept travelling was to learn.

"But I don't even know what the lesson _is_," the Doctor grumbled.

Ms. Frizzle winked at him. "Then I would suggest you open your eyes yourself, Doctor, or you'll miss it entirely."

"You could just tell me, you know," the Doctor said.

Ms. Frizzle shook her head. "You'll learn your lesson better if you find it out for yourself than if I simply tell you. One thing I will tell you, Doctor, is that we take chances here, and we make mistakes, and we get messy. That way, we can learn."

"Yes, that would be a bit more interesting than reading through ancient volumes detailing times past in a dead language, wouldn't it?" the Doctor mused. "For eight year olds, at the very least."

"Quite," Ms. Frizzle agreed. She glanced in the direction of her classroom, then added, "But I would suggest that we not leave our students for too long. They're a clever bunch, and they never fail to surprise me."

"I've no doubt about that," the Doctor said, "but I do doubt the day will come when you fail to surprise them. Mind you," he added, picking up his suit jacket and pulling it back on, "I don't look forward to the day they fancy themselves grown up and above your particular brand of learning."

"Don't give up on them so quickly," Ms. Frizzle chastised gently. "They might not have let themselves look because you gave them no reason to."

"I asked them to look," the Doctor protested. "I even said they'd see it if they tried, if they opened their eyes and really looked. I asked them to, and they didn't!"

"But you didn't show them how," Ms. Frizzle pointed out, "and you let yourself get caught up in it, too."

The Doctor blinked. "You weren't? You saw everything?"

"Pyramids and all," Ms. Frizzle confirmed softly. "You were in the right place, but you were so focused on everything else, so convinced that there had to be a different problem, that you didn't look closely enough, either. Mind your own lessons, Doctor. You'll forget yourself if you aren't careful."

The Doctor was quiet for a moment. "You're right," he said at length. "About everything, those kids included. They won't ever notice anything if I don't convince them that it's worth looking for." If he could convince them now, there was a chance, a slim, tiny, sliver of a chance that they would remember when they got older.

Of course, some people, in the rush to grow up, would only push the impossible truths away all the harder, deliberately blinding themselves so that they could tether themselves to the hard and fast rules of the real world. Those sorts of people ignored the fact that rules were sometimes bent, and they ignored all that came out of bending those rules. He did a lot of rule-bending himself, so he ought to know.

"I was supposed to talk to them about mysteries, right?" the Doctor said. Without waiting for Ms. Frizzle's confirmation, he continued, "Well, half the fun of a mystery is solving it, if you've got enough information to solve it or to track down all the pieces in the first place. And they might discount the truth when it's right in front of them, but I've got to give them that chance, haven't I? And you're right. I haven't. And I shouldn't be so quick to judge, either."

"None of us should be," Ms. Frizzle agreed.

The Doctor gave her a silly grin. "All right, then. We'd better get back in there before those children have solved all the world's mysteries without us. I'd hate to miss out on the discoveries."

Ms. Frizzle just laughed.


	8. Chapter 8: Carlos

At lunch, the first thing Carlos did was track down his brother, Mikey. To be honest, he would have preferred getting his lunch first, but Wanda had said that he'd have plenty of time to eat after. Carlos wasn't sure he believed her, but he was willing to forego his lunch hour just this once—but only because Phoebe had graciously offered to save some food for him in case Wanda was wrong and he _didn't_ have plenty of time to eat.

Wanda hadn't quite finished explaining her plan before the Doctor and Ms. Frizzle came back, but Liz had been watching from the window and had given them warning, since they'd asked her to. Carlos couldn't help but wonder if Liz would have told them about the Doctor if they'd just asked. She was getting pretty good at charades, and if Ms. Frizzle knew the Doctor, there was a good chance that Liz did, too.

But if the point of the Doctor's lesson was to search, as Ralphie had suggested, then Carlos supposed asking Liz would just have been cheating.

It didn't matter, anyway. They knew the gist of Wanda's plan, and DA had started her part immediately by plying the Doctor with questions. She knew the broadest range of random facts of any of them and her task was to see if she could figure out the Doctor's strengths and weaknesses.

Besides, she liked getting lectured at, definitely more than he did. DA would turn to her books before she'd try to do anything. Him, he'd just go out and try to do it. That seemed much simpler to him. He knew right away whether or not something was going to work, and he didn't waste time theorizing about this or that before trying to figure out the best plan of action and then taking that much more time to actually carry the plan out.

Still. They were trying to gather information now. His job was to talk to Mikey to see if he could find anything out. Mikey was good with electronics and computers and everything else, and the teachers knew it. They encouraged him, and it was easy for him to get access to a computer over the noon hour; they trusted him enough not to need supervision, though that's not to say no one never checked in on him if he did spend most of his lunch hour in the computer lab.

"Hey, Mikey!" Carlos called, spotting his brother and waving at him.

Mikey glanced over his shoulder, then manoeuvred his wheelchair over to Carlos. "What's up?"

"I need a favour."

"Computer trouble?"

Carlos shook his head. "I need help researching someone's past. We've got this weird guest speaker who was supposed to come in to talk to us about mysteries, and we're trying to figure out who he really is."

"So you don't have a name?"

"Not exactly. All he told us was 'the Doctor'."

Mikey frowned. "That doesn't help much."

"We don't really know much," Carlos said, but he told Mikey all they did know.

Ten minutes later found them in the computer lab, with Mikey searching through more things than Carlos really understood. But as time ticked away, they didn't find anything. Nothing useful, at any rate. A few mentions of a mysterious man who called himself the Doctor every once in a while, but never anything that fit the description of the man who was, in all likelihood, still talking Dorothy Ann's ear off, whether in the cafeteria or in Ms. Frizzle's classroom.

"I don't think I'm going to find anything," Mikey admitted. "I don't know where else to look."

Neither did Carlos. Well, there were plenty more places to look, of course, but they couldn't narrow anything down. They didn't have enough information. It was, Mikey said, too broad of a search.

"Maybe you should ask Mr. Ruhle," Mikey suggested. He checked the time, then said, "You've still got fifteen minutes before the bell, and he ought to know about the Doctor if he's a speaker."

"Yeah, you're right," Carlos said, surprised that no one else had thought of that. "Thanks, Mikey!"

"Anytime, bro."

Carlos headed to the principal's office but was told that Mr. Ruhle hadn't yet returned from lunch. When asked whether he would like to leave a message, Carlos figured he might as well ask the secretary whether or not she knew about their guest speaker.

"Ms. Frizzle brought in a guest speaker?" came the incredulous reply. "We were never informed of this."

"Never informed of what?" Mr. Ruhle asked, making a timely entrance into the school office.

"Valerie brought in a guest speaker," the secretary replied.

"Oh, right. I did mean to speak to her about that," Mr. Ruhle said.

"You knew?" Carlos asked.

"About the speaker? Heavens, no. Ms. Frizzle hardly finds the time to tell us about your field trips, let alone anything else she does. The only reason we can keep her on without the school board complaining is your class's impressive record, particularly in science. No, that guest speaker of yours bumped into me this morning and asked how to find your classroom. What was his name again? Dr.—?"

He didn't know either, Carlos realized. "All he told us was the Doctor."

"Yes, I do recall that that's what he told me, too," Mr. Ruhle mused. He paused, then added, "Tell me, Carlos, what do you think about the Doctor? Should we invite him back to speak again?"

"Er, well, he hasn't exactly finished his lesson," Carlos said.

"But is he interesting to listen to? Are you learning anything?"

Learning anything? They were too busy trying to figure out what the heck was going on to learn anything. Besides, the few speeches the Doctor had actually given didn't really count as lessons, did they? Most of the time, he was making stuff up, and he didn't back up his points with evidence. Carlos knew all about debating, so he could spot a poor argument a mile off. It took a lot of preparation to make a good speech, and, well, he wasn't sure the Doctor had done any preparation. He hadn't even known what he was going to talk about until he came.

Heck, as far as Carlos could tell, the Doctor wasn't even used to giving speeches in classrooms. He could talk _at_ them, yes, but he didn't really talk _to _them. Half the things he said didn't make sense, and while he sometimes went back to correct or to explain himself, he didn't always do that. He _acted_ like he knew everything, and Carlos could appreciate that. You needed to project that sort of confidence in a debate or your opponent would take advantage of your apparent weakness. But they'd seen about as much evidence of real knowledge from the Doctor as they had of the existence of aliens.

"He's interesting to hear," Carlos finally said, "but I'm not sure how much I'm learning."

Mr. Ruhle frowned. "What was the topic again?"

"Mysteries," Carlos said.

"Bit broad, isn't it?"

"He told us to suggest topics, and we settled on aliens, but all he's really told us so far is not to litter. He got a bit sidetracked."

"Hmm." Mr. Ruhle looked thoughtful for a moment. "Yes, I did get the impression that he might be a bit easily distracted when I spoke with him." He checked his watch, then said to Carlos, "The bell will go in a few minutes. Tell the Doctor that I'd like to speak with him when he's finished his lesson, all right?"

"Yes, sir," Carlos replied.

Carlos made it back to the classroom in time to wolf down his lunch, but according to Tim, DA hadn't made any more progress than he had. The Doctor, it seemed, really did know bits of information about everything, and as far as Dorothy Ann could tell, he wasn't just making it up. He really did know his stuff. Tim and Keesha had made up a list of what they knew and what they suspected about the Doctor, but apparently it was still pretty short. Wanda and Ralphie hadn't gotten any information out of Ms. Frizzle, and Arnold, who'd tracked down his cousin Janet on the off chance that _she _knew anything, hadn't come up with anything, either.

"So," the Doctor said, after the bell had rung and everyone had taken their seats, and after Carlos had delivered his message from Principle Ruhle, "what did you learn this morning?"

There was a brief period of silence, then Phoebe said, "To remember not to litter wherever you are."

"Well, yes," the Doctor agreed, "but I expect you knew that beforehand, didn't you, and just forgot because you were in such a rush to get back to Earth and thaw out Arnold, weren't you? No, I was thinking more along the lines of what you learned that you hadn't known before."

This time, the silence wasn't broken.

"Oh, come on," the Doctor said. "Ralphie, I told you about primordial soup, didn't I? Amino acids? Building blocks of life? And the vampires? Remember that? And I told all of you about one of the Plutonian viruses, the strain that produces anthocyanin, and the Osirians and their pyramids on Mars."

"But we never saw any pyramids on Mars," Keesha said.

The Doctor grinned. "No, you didn't. And do you know what? Neither did I! And that was the trouble all along, you see. I didn't really look, and neither did any of you. Be honest, now. Did any one of you believe me? Really believe me, I mean? Anyone? Anyone at all?" The Doctor paused. "No," he said at last, "I didn't think so. After all, what proof did I give you? None! None at all. You just had to take me at my word. And that," he concluded, "is hard in this day and age, isn't it? It's hard to just take someone's word for something, especially about something like this, isn't it?"

"You said you'd show us, though," Keesha reminded him, "and you didn't."

"No, I did," the Doctor countered. "Trouble was, I said we'd all need to really open our eyes and look for it. And, we didn't. So we never saw anything."

"Because there wasn't anything there to see."

The Doctor shook his head. "No, no. It was there, Keesha. It was right in front of us. We just ignored it." He paused, then continued, "Thing is, we need to take a few things on faith. Faith and trust and—"

"Pixie dust?" Carlos asked, smirking.

"Well, I was _going_ to say blind belief, but whatever you please. You all know about Peter Pan, right? None of those children would have been able to fly if they hadn't had faith and trust in what, according to all the adults in the world, was impossible."

"But _Peter Pan_'s just a story," Wanda protested.

"It's just a story to you," the Doctor corrected. "Let's put it this way. Have you lot ever tried telling anyone the truth about your field trips? The whole truth, I mean?"

"We told Mr. Ruhle when we learned about chicks forming in the egg," Tim said.

The Doctor nodded. "And what did he say?"

"He didn't believe us when we said that Arnold was really inside the egg and telling us what was happening, or that we sped the time up," Phoebe replied.

"No, I didn't thi— Hold on, sped the time up?" the Doctor repeated. "You sped up time? As in, compressed it? Made everything shorter?"

The class nodded.

The Doctor turned to Ms. Frizzle. "You can compress time?"

She smiled. "If necessary."

"Do you have _any_ idea how _dangerous_ that is?" the Doctor asked incredulously.

"We were all quite safe, I assure you."

"Yeah," Carlos added. "No danger of getting eaten by a dinosaur that time."

"A dinosaur?" the Doctor echoed, turning to him now.

"Yeah, we went back about 67 million years," Carlos replied easily, remembering DA's correction from this morning. "And we didn't even get jet lag."

The Doctor ignored this last comment, too caught up on his first one. "You went back to the late Cretaceous Period?" He looked at Ms. Frizzle again. "You can go back to the _Cretaceous Period_?"

"We learn by experiencing things, as I said."

"You can't…. The _Cretaceous Period_?" The Doctor ran his fingers through his hair. "What if you'd left something behind? You could have changed history! What if someone had dug up, oh, I dunno, a coin from 1990 back in 1890? Do you have any idea what kind of havoc that would have caused?"

"We were quite careful, I assure you. We didn't leave any of those sorts of traces behind." Ms. Frizzle lifted her chin slightly. "I hardly think I'd still be in my position if I weren't careful, Doctor. I knew precisely what I was doing." She paused, then said, "But I do believe you were trying to make a point earlier?"

The Doctor looked like he wasn't ready to drop the issue, but then he shook his head and dismissed the matter for now. "Right," he said. "Where was I?"

"Mr. Ruhle didn't believe us when we told him about our field trip," Phoebe supplied.

"Right. Yes. He didn't believe you because, in his eyes, what you'd done wasn't possible. The truth was right in front of him, but he didn't see it. So he thought you were making it up, telling a story, elaborating on the truth—anything but just _telling_ the perfect truth. All because it sounded impossible to his ears." The Doctor paused. "Any of you told your parents?"

They all shook their heads.

"Not one of you? No? For the same reason, I'd assume. Because they wouldn't believe you."

"So we're supposed to believe you," Wanda asked, "because you think it's the same sort of thing?"

"Well, I believe you," the Doctor said. "If I didn't, I wouldn't have noticed, now would I? It wouldn't have worked. I would have just seen what I expected to see." He frowned. "Wait a minute." He spun on his heels to face Ms. Frizzle. "You knew that was going to happen!"

"The circumstances change, Doctor, depending on the person," Ms. Frizzle said simply. "I don't know anything with certainty when it comes to the likes of you."

"I'm beginning to wonder," the Doctor muttered. Addressing the class again, he said, "But you see my point, don't you?"

"Let me get this straight," Ralphie said. "You're saying that the only reason we didn't see any evidence of aliens is because we didn't completely believe you?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying," the Doctor said. "Your doubts blinded you, grabbed hold of your imagination and stifled it."

"Imagination?" DA repeated. "But that's not evidence."

"Maybe not," the Doctor said, "but without your imagination, you could never see that evidence."

"So you're saying aliens really do exist," Arnold said. "You're not just saying it. You actually mean it."

"I've always meant it," the Doctor said.

"But you can't prove it," Keesha said bluntly.

The Doctor sighed. "I would rather hope that I wouldn't have to prove it."

"But you said you would," Tim reminded him.

"And because I said I would, I have to?" the Doctor asked quietly. "You demand proof because I said I could provide it? Maybe I can, but perhaps it's in my best interests not to. Belief can't be bought. It's not real if it is. That's fraudulent faith, not the real thing, not if you need proof before you'll believe."

"So the mystery of alien life remains a mystery," Carlos said. "Someone better call E.T. and tell him."

"Actually, that one was just a story," the Doctor commented. "But if you want proof of alien life, then just open your eyes, because it's right in front of you."

"But there's nothing here," Dorothy Ann said.

"Sure there is," the Doctor said. "You just need to be willing to see it."

"So there's an alien in the room instead of an elephant in the room?" Carlos asked, remembering one of the expressions his mother always used. He meant it as a joke, and from the groans of his classmates, that's what they took it as.

The Doctor, however, didn't groan or even smile.

He nodded.


	9. Chapter 9: Keesha

"You're not serious," Keesha said. "You can't be serious." There was no way there was an alien in the room. Aliens didn't exist. DA was right; there'd be research or some evidence, some real proof. Something substantial, not just tall tales or mistaken UFO sightings. Lights in the sky her foot; if people weren't just plain imagining things, there was some reasonable explanation for it all. There always was.

"I'm perfectly serious," the Doctor replied.

"But it's not…dangerous, is it?" Phoebe asked, looking a bit nervous. Keesha, frankly, agreed with what Arnold was mumbling: he should have stayed home today, and she should have, too. She certainly wasn't learning anything now.

"To you?" the Doctor asked. "Nah. Who'd want to hurt you? Now, if another alien was trying to hurt you, or even just another human, yes, I imagine this particular alien would have a thing or two to say about that, but you'd be perfectly safe."

"Where is it?" Ralphie asked, looking around eagerly. "I can't see anything."

"Right in front of you," the Doctor answered.

"Oh, brother," Keesha muttered. Why anyone even bothered believing the Doctor was beyond her. He'd already established quite plainly that he was nuts, or at the very least making everything up. He might know a lot of random stuff—Dorothy Ann had certainly confirmed that, seeing as the Doctor had reportedly rambled on quite happily about every topic she'd brought up—but she didn't think he needed to carry a silly charade like this so far.

"Is it a Martian?" Ralphie asked. "Or a Plutonian?"

Or maybe, Keesha thought sarcastically, it was a little, green, floating alien who was exiled to Earth from his home planet of Zetox and who only appeared to people who believed in him.

Well, that would rule her out.

The Doctor shook his head. "Nope. Gallifreyan. Not native to this solar system. Well-travelled, this one. You can't even see the Kasterborous constellation from here."

"I still don't see anything," Wanda said. "You'll have to show us where it's hiding."

"Who says he's hiding?" the Doctor asked. "I said before, he's right in front of you. You can see him. You just have to believe you're seeing him."

There was silence for a moment. "Is it just me," Ralphie started, "or are you…. Nah, you can't be."

"Can't be what?" the Doctor asked innocently.

Tim, however, had figured out what Ralphie was going to say. "You're not trying to tell us it's you, are you?"

The Doctor's response was the widest, silliest grin he'd given them yet.

"No way!" Wanda exclaimed.

"What, you thought I was fibbing earlier when I'd said I'd stood in a room full of aliens? No, I've done that plenty of times, all over the place. In more places than you can imagine, I'd bet."

"Come off it," Keesha scoffed. "If you're an alien, I'm the queen of England."

The Doctor frowned. "Oh, you're not going to exile me, too, are you? I've already been knighted and exiled. And, _and_ Queen Elizabeth the First wants my head, for no good reason as far as I can tell. Still haven't worked that one out." He scratched the back of his neck. "You won't want me beheaded, will you?"

Keesha threw up her arms. "You're impossible!"

"Yeah, I'm told that quite a bit, too," the Doctor agreed amiably.

"But if you're really an alien," DA asked, "how come you look like us?"

"You're a shapeshifter, aren't you?" Ralphie asked eagerly. "You can change your appearance to look like the inhabitants of the planet you visit so that you can walk among them undetected."

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "And just how many comic books do you read?" he asked. The others snickered.

"So you're not a shapeshifter?" Ralphie asked.

"Not like that," the Doctor said. "I'm a humanoid, just like you and a good many other species in the universe. It's a common template. But, I don't need to employ a shimmer or any other tricks to appear human. This is what I look like, honest. It just happens to be a different face than I've had in the past, and, no, I can't change at will, it's just a funny little quirk of my biology."

"A funny little quirk of your biology?" Carlos repeated.

"You know how they say cats have nine lives? I've got thirteen, unless something goes wrong, and I change each time." The Doctor sighed. "But questioning me wasn't the point. You're missing the point."

"You're an alien," Carlos said. "How can we be missing the point?"

"The reason I told you," the Doctor said, "was so that you could drop your blinders, so that you don't have to look at the world with blinkered vision. You're young, but you're already building up a wall in front of you that'll block out anything that doesn't immediately appear acceptable." He looked pointedly at Keesha, and she had to consciously not squirm in her seat under his gaze. "You still don't believe me," he said bluntly.

"No, because it's ludicrous."

"See? Just the other day, I was called ridiculous, and now you're telling me that I'm ludicrous. I'll admit that I've been called a madman, and that I've called myself a madman a time or two, but, really, I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

"What?"

"Oh, right," the Doctor said, tugging at an ear. "I suppose it'll be a few years before you read _Hamlet_, won't it? Point is, as mad as I may sound, I'm really not. Any madness of mine is finely calculated."

"You mean you act crazy on purpose," Keesha said.

"I mean I'm not delusional, and yes, if it suits my purpose, I'll act as mad as I like, but I've seen madness, real madness, and I'm not there yet." He paused. "Mind you, I certainly am eccentric, and a genius, if I do say so myself, and it is a fine line between madness and brilliance, so I may toe that line from time to time, but I certainly haven't taken any flying leaps across it and lost my wits in the process."

Keesha frowned, but she didn't bother arguing with him. It wasn't worth it; she had a feeling she wouldn't win, anyway. If he wanted to claim to be an alien, fine, but he certainly wasn't convincing her any. She'd thought, back when he'd first come, that maybe, just maybe, he really did have proof of alien life, and that aliens really did exist. Well, she'd since revised her opinion. He sure as heck didn't have any proof, and if aliens did exist, they weren't anywhere around here—certainly not standing at the front of the classroom.

"So if you're an alien, what are you?" Wanda asked.

"I'm a Time Lord," the Doctor replied, "from Gallifrey." He stuck his hands in his pockets. "And, in answer to your next question, I've been to Earth many times over the years, so I've become quite adept at your languages. Well, I'm quite adept at many languages, actually, not just the ones that originated on Earth."

"Where's your ship?" Ralphie asked. "Can we go look at it?"

"It's a bit of a hike from here," the Doctor said. "We don't have the time to go see it, I'm afraid. Perhaps a different day."

Oh, yeah, he was _definitely_ making it up, Keesha decided. If she'd had any doubts, that got rid of them. A bit of a hike. Ha. It wasn't too far to walk to his ship; he didn't have a ship to walk to, that was the real reason. But there wasn't any point in trying to talk sense into anyone else, least of all Ralphie, who looked the most enthused of anyone. Ralphie was impossible once he got an idea into his head. He'd even thought Ms. Frizzle was a vampire once, and it had taken them half the night to prove him wrong, though the fact that it was night probably had had something to do with it.

"I'm not sure I understand what you were saying before," Phoebe said. "If you were right about everything, how could we not see something if it's right in front of us? Pyramids shouldn't be easy to miss."

"That, I'm afraid," the Doctor said, drawing his hands out of his pockets, "is not entirely my territory. Part of that comes down to your magic school bus."

"The bus?" Dorothy Ann echoed, surprised.

"The bus," the Doctor confirmed. He glanced at Ms. Frizzle. "Would you care to explain?"

"I think you're doing quite fine," Ms. Frizzle replied.

"Oh, all right, then," the Doctor said. He sucked in a breath through his teeth, then explained, "Near as I can tell, the bus can shield you from things. There're heat shields, oxygen shields, pressure shields, what have you. And, now, here's the thing. You trust Ms. Frizzle, every last one of you, but you don't trust me. I mean, I suppose I can't expect you to; you just met me, and I haven't been doing a very good job of earning your trust, now have I? Thing is, when I promised you aliens, you didn't entirely believe me. You didn't think I could deliver on that promise, certainly not when I intended to turn up evidence on planets in your own solar system. Certainly not," the Doctor added pointedly, "when I claimed something as ludicrous as the existence of pyramids on Mars."

Keesha crossed her arms and didn't meet the Doctor's gaze, staring instead at her desk.

"Now, the important part about your bus," the Doctor continued, "is that you believe in it, and in all the things that it can do, and in Ms. Frizzle when she teaches you all her lessons and the importance of taking chances, making mistakes, and getting messy in the process. Because if you didn't believe in it, you'd miss it. You wouldn't be able to see it, not really."

"That can't be right," Arnold said. "Janet didn't believe me when I told her about our field trips. She demanded that we prove it, and we did. If what you're saying is true, we wouldn't have been able to."

The Doctor inclined his head. "You've got a point, but that's the beauty of it, really. Every single one of you believed and wanted to prove to your cousin the truth of your words, didn't you? And, I'll bet that as much as she might have scoffed at you before, she wanted to know the truth, too. She wanted to know whether you were making it all up or not." He paused. "It was different with me. You all wanted to see the proof of alien life that I claimed to have, but you didn't believe I could produce it. Me, well, I never really expected that I wouldn't be able to produce it, but I _was_ expecting something to go wrong, seeing as things usually do wherever I turn up. The bus, bless her, responded accordingly and let you see what you expected to see, and I was too focused on trying to figure out exactly how your magic school bus worked that I got caught up in her magic along with all of you without even realizing it."

"So we saw nothing, you mean, because we didn't really expect to see anything," Keesha said, risking a glance at the Doctor.

He smiled at her. "Exactly. Nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary, at any rate. No proof. But, I'd be fibbing if I laid the blame entirely on the bus. All she was doing was amplifying the walls you've already built for yourselves, and none of you, nor me, bothered to try to see through it. You see, all of you are already laying the groundwork for forgetting the magic of your school days. All of your field trips, I mean. They'll just be stories, not truths."

"But we're not going to forget our field trips," Phoebe said, sounding almost alarmed.

"No," the Doctor agreed softly, "you won't forget them, or the lessons you learned. You'll just explain the magic away."

Keesha swallowed. "Like I'm doing now, you mean. About you." She couldn't exactly deny it. She really didn't believe him. But when he said it like that, and knowing that everyone else obviously _did_ believe him, well….

The Doctor nodded. "You'll invent excuses," he said, "and come up with reasonable, acceptable explanations. You'll ignore the impossible. You'll stick with the hard and fast rules of the real world, the adult world, the stringent, dull world that's based on accepted facts and theories and that buries or scorns or just plain ignores anything that doesn't quite fit."

"But how can we do that if we don't forget what we've done and all the field trips we've gone on?" Wanda asked.

"Oh, believe me," the Doctor said, "it's all too possible, and all too easy. It's worse if you're the sort of person who's in a rush to grow up. Then you will call all of this mere products of your imagination or detailed lessons taught in an inventive way rather than an actual adventure you went on for one of your field trips. People can discover entire worlds in their childhood and forget them if they're too eager to join the adult world. They push the memories away, calling it nothing more than fancy and play, and they refuse to listen to anyone who tries to tell them otherwise. But, the thing is, that adult world—it's not limiting in its own right. You _can_ exist in it and not be bound by it." He grinned. "Look at Ms. Frizzle. She's certainly not bound by it, not like that principal of yours. She can still see if she looks."

"Always the flatterer," Ms. Frizzle said with a laugh. "You give me far too much credit, Doctor. I wouldn't be where I am now if it weren't for my wonderful students."

"Perhaps not," the Doctor relented, "but I highly doubt you'd be so different that anyone would call you unremarkable." Addressing the class again, he said, "And none of you need to fit the mould perfectly, either. No one really does, but so many pretend to. They _pretend_ that they're exactly where they want to be, that they've done what society expects, that they don't have any skeletons in the closet or anything like that. They forget what's inconvenient, and in doing so, they usually forget what's important, too. Like your friends and your family and your faith in what you know is true even if no one's proved it to you."

"But you just confirmed that aliens really do exist," Ralphie said. "You admitted that you're not from Earth. That's not having us take it on faith."

The Doctor grinned at him. "No, it's not, is it? Well, not unless you look a little closer. After all, what proof did I give you?"

He hadn't given them _any_ proof, Keesha thought. Not really. He'd just said he was an alien. And, as far as she could tell, everyone had believed him. Even her, in the end, if only because he was awfully convincing…. But that was silly, and she needed to keep things straight. The Doctor was as human as the rest of them. "You just gave us words," Keesha said, realizing that that just might be the answer he was looking for.

"Precisely," the Doctor said. "I just gave you my word. It wasn't enough earlier, but now that you've gotten to know me a bit better, it's worth more, isn't it?"

Wait a minute.

Keesha narrowed her eyes. "I thought you said someone's word wasn't really proof."

The Doctor shrugged. "It's proof enough if you take it as proof. It's worth just as much, I'd say, as anything else these days, and it's only going to get harder to pick out the falsehoods from the truths." He pulled out a coin from his pocket, showed it to the class, then enclosed it in his fist and opened it again to reveal that the coin had vanished. "Illusion," he continued, "plays an increasingly large role these days. Sometimes it's used to garner people's faith, and sometimes it's used to discredit it. It really depends who's behind it all." Another flick of the wrist, and the Doctor was holding the coin again. He showed it to them before pocketing it. "But, regardless of whether the intention behind the creation of an illusion is good, you still need to do a fair bit of digging if you want to uncover the whole truth."

"You're as good as admitting you lied to us," Keesha said, sounding disgusted.

The Doctor shook his head immediately. "Oh, no. No, not one bit. I told you the truth because you needed to hear it. I'm just trying to convince you that there's value in hearing it in the first place."

"He has a point, Keesha," Phoebe said quietly. "I spend a lot of time listening to things, and you hear a lot more if you take the time to listen to it." She smiled self-consciously then, adding, "Besides, I've tried acting on things before I knew the entire story, and I haven't been entirely right yet, have I?"

"We've all done things like that," DA admitted. "Remember the time Ralphie and I were arguing, and we ended up trying to play baseball without friction? We were so busy trying to convince the other that we were right that we didn't listen to each other. If we had, we might've realized earlier that we were better off working together because we each had different pieces right."

"Listening is good for another reason, too," Arnold added. "We have to pay attention to listen, and we probably won't forget about our assignment again, huh, Keesha?"

"I never said anything against listening," Keesha protested. "I just…. Listen to him, you guys. We're right back where we started." She glanced at the Doctor, saying, "No offense, but, really, no one's questioning the fact that when you came in here this morning, you said that you had proof that aliens exist and that you'd show us, and now we're back, and all you're doing is saying that _you're_ an alien and expecting that that's proof enough for us when you haven't proven anything!"

"But he's saying that we need to take some things on faith," Tim reminded her. "This is how he's proving his point."

"But taking things on faith isn't science," Keesha said adamantly. "Back me up here, DA!"

Dorothy Ann looked apologetic. "I don't know if I can," she said. "Some things _are_ taken on faith. It's just not called that. When people come up with theories, those theories aren't really accepted as facts. They're right until they're proven wrong, and people do a lot of research trying to prove them wrong so that they can come up with a revised theory which is more likely to be right. But we'll never manage to prove a theory right or it wouldn't be a theory anymore. It'd be fact then. But some theories are so old that people just do take it on faith that they're right."

"Not to worry," the Doctor said. "If you ever have doubts, you only need to listen to your heart. That'll tell you truths your mind ignores." He pulled out a stethoscope from his pocket in much the same manner that Ms. Frizzle always produced things from hers, though a stethoscope was, admittedly, quite smaller than, say, a giant light bulb or moulds for the bus. Granted, that stethoscope looked a tad large for the Doctor's pockets, anyway...

The stethoscope in question was placed on the desk in front of her. "There you go," the Doctor said. "Have a listen."

Keesha stared at it, then looked up at him. "You're kidding, right?"

"Course not," the Doctor said. "Go on."

Remembering all the times she'd played at being a doctor with her cousins, Keesha fitted the stethoscope to her ears and placed the disk over her heart. She listened to the steady rhythm of her heartbeat for a moment before moving to take the stethoscope off, but the Doctor stopped her before she had the chance, telling her that she might as well listen to his heart, too, to see if she could tell if he was telling the truth.

The grin on his face should have given her warning, but she was fairly sure nothing would have prepared her for the surprise she felt upon hearing the Doctor's heartbeat.

Either he had a _very_ irregular heartbeat, or….

No. She wasn't going to go to the _or_. Not yet. She needed a minute first.

The Doctor neatly removed the stethoscope and pocketed it again. She heard him make some comment about doubting Thomases to the class, but she wasn't really paying attention anymore. Her mind was still trying to play catch-up with her ears, trying to accept what she'd thought she'd heard.

She'd seen a lot of things in Ms. Frizzle's class. She'd been a lot of places. She'd learned a lot of things.

And yet, somehow, it was harder to accept what she was realizing now than it had been to accept anything else she'd ever learned.

Ralphie was right.

Ralphie and his comic books were actually right.

Not about vampires, but….

Keesha took a slow breath. She'd been demanding proof right from the start. It had taken the Doctor long enough to offer it, so she shouldn't scorn it when she finally got it. She'd been told the truth the entire time, and now that unbelievable, impossible truth was proven, at least as far as she could tell, to be undeniably real.

Well, at least she now knew that it definitely had been worth coming to school today.

* * *

A/N: Yes, the little, green, floating alien who was exiled to Earth from his home planet of Zetox and who only appears to people who believe in him is the Great Gazoo from _The Flintstones_. Thanks to everyone who takes the time to review; it's nice to know when people are enjoying things!


	10. Chapter 10: Tim

Tim wasn't sure what Keesha had heard when she'd listened to the Doctor's heart, but he'd guess by the look on her face that she believed him now. He was a bit curious himself but figured he could ask Keesha about it later. The Doctor had already moved on, changing the subject from himself and aliens in general back to their first topic of the day: mysteries.

"The thing about mysteries," he was saying, "is that you can have as much fun imagining the truth behind them as finding it out for yourself. Now, let's take, oh, someone mentioned the Loch Ness Monster earlier, didn't they?"

"I did," Wanda said. If memory served, she'd looked it up after Gerri Poveri's story about the Monster of Walker Lake. She'd turned up a whole bunch of supposed sea monsters and lake monsters and such, but the Loch Ness one was the only one Tim could remember now.

"Do you know the truth behind that? Well, the truth as everyone else knows it?" the Doctor asked.

"They haven't found anything yet," Wanda said, "and the famous picture they've got of it is a fake."

"Yes, the surgeon's photograph, taken by Robert Wilson in 1934," the Doctor said. He paused, then continued, "People attribute it to a lot of things. Illusion, mostly. Tricks of the light, heat off the water, bits of debris. People imagine seeing something because they want to see something. But, the story of Nessie has persisted for a reason."

"You mean it's real?" Wanda said.

"Well, yes and no," the Doctor said. "_Niseag_ isn't just a myth. It was real enough, I suppose. All of them were. But they were never what you lot thought they were."

Carlos laughed. "All of them?" he repeated. "That makes it sound like there used to be monsters."

The Doctor raised his eyebrows at him. "There still are."

"At this rate," Ralphie said, "there ought to be some sort of convention for them all."

"Yeah," Carlos chimed in. "They could have a dance and do the monster mash."

The Doctor chuckled. "No such luck. They're a scattered lot. Now, the ones behind most of Nessie's tales are the Zygons. They brought Skarasens to Earth, and the Skarasens are sort of like reptilian cyborgs—part flesh, part machine—that look surprisingly similar to plesiosaurs. And, there's been a few of them around. As I recall, I've let two of them go. They aren't any harm to people when they're not being controlled, after all, and it's not their fault that they're here, and my best guess is that they went back to the only home they've known."

"Loch Ness," Wanda realized.

The Doctor nodded. "And Westmorland, which is in England, but that was just the second one. The first one did, as far as I know, return to Loch Ness." He clicked his tongue. "That's one mystery solved, then, yes? Well, two, if you count my existence." Without giving anyone a chance to comment, the Doctor reached into his pocket and pulled out the jar in which Janet had trapped a bit of Jupiter's red spot. "Anyone ready to learn about a third?" At the answering grins, the Doctor continued, "So, who can tell me what this is?"

"Part of Jupiter's red spot," DA said. "Hydrogen and helium gas, mostly."

"Correcta— Oh, no, I wasn't going to say that again. Yes, right. Precisely. Anyone know what the sun's composed of?"

The question sent DA scrambling for her books, but Tim figured he could guess where the Doctor was going with this. "The same?" he ventured.

The Doctor nodded. "Exactly. Well, not exactly as in exactly the same degree of composition, but it's still mostly hydrogen and helium. The sun's got about seventy percent hydrogen and twenty-eight percent helium, going by mass, with metals and such making up the rest, though, over time, those numbers shift a bit. Any guesses why?"

"According to my research," Dorothy Ann answered, looking up from her book, "the nuclear fusion process in the sun's core converts hydrogen to helium. Energy is produced from a difference in mass between the hydrogen and the helium."

"Righto," the Doctor said. "Einstein's equation, stating that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. You've learned the parts of an atom, right? The nucleus being in the centre, composed of protons and neutrons with the electrons in rings around it? Well, it's the nucleus, or rather the nuclei—that's the plural form, like cactus and cacti— that are involved in a fusion reaction. When the mass of the nucleus of the new helium atom formed in the fusion process is less than that of all the hydrogen nuclei that were combined to form the helium nucleus, energy is released." He paused. "That's one of the primary differences between the sun and Jupiter. Jupiter's a giant in terms of gas planets, and not just in this solar system, but it's not large enough to heat things up enough to start the process of nuclear fusion."

The Doctor glanced at the jar of gas again, then handed it over to Ms. Frizzle. "Here you are," he said. "Future science lesson. You can finish up the explanation then. I'd best not get into it now. It might eat up a bit too much of our time, and we've plenty of mysteries to get through."

"Like the 1666 fire in London?"

The Doctor frowned. "You were the one to say that, then."

Ms. Frizzle laughed, getting to her feet and taking the jar over to the closet where she kept so many of her things—including the pinball machine in which they'd learned about light and all the colours of the visible spectrum. "I've heard stories," she admitted, "and plenty that I heard in my days as a Shakespearian actress were of times past."

"In your—_what_?"

"They used footlights then," Keesha said as Ms. Frizzle disappeared inside the closet. "That's what Ms. Frizzle told me last time."

"Shakespearian actress?" the Doctor repeated.

"It's probably better not to ask," Keesha advised. "I think I speak from experience."

The Doctor shook his head. "All right. I'll save my questions for later. But in answer to yours, Valerie Frizzle," the Doctor added as she returned, "that fire was _not_ my fault."

"I never said it was."

"In 1666?" Phoebe asked, likely as surprised as the rest of them by the Doctor's indignation and Ms. Frizzle's allegation. "But that was over 300 years ago! How could you have been around then?"

The Doctor glanced over at her. "I look very good for my age," he said, quite seriously. A split second later, though, he was grinning, and he added, "Plus, I'm a Time Lord, as I've said, so I'm no stranger to time travel. Comes in handy, that."

"That's why you were so concerned when you found out that we'd visited the Cretaceous Period," Tim realized.

The Doctor nodded. "Yes. Time's not to be mucked about in, though that's not to say people don't try." He sighed. "That's not what caused that fire, though. No, the Great Fire of London was caused when a Terileptil weapon overloaded. It exploded, and Pudding Lane went up in flames." He paused, then said, "But, some good did come out of it. Anyone have any idea what that might be?"

"Good conditions for a wiener roast?" Carlos suggested.

"Probably a bit hot for that," the Doctor said. "Anyone else?" DA was still flipping through her books, so the Doctor turned to Ms. Frizzle. "Would you care to answer this one?"

"Certainly." Ms. Frizzle nodded at the Doctor and then addressed the class, saying, "Do you all remember when Ralphie was ill?"

"All too well," Ralphie said, "if you mean the time I had strep throat."

"Yes," Ms. Frizzle replied. "You only got better once your body managed to fight off the bacteria. In 1666, another kind of bacteria was infecting the people of London, one which caused the bubonic plague."

"That's…that's the Black Death, isn't it?" Arnold asked, sounding rather uncertain. "I thought that was earlier."

"The pandemic, where the disease affected many countries at once, occurred in the 1300s," Ms. Frizzle agreed, "but the disease was still prevalent after that, and between 1665 and 1666, there was the Great Plague of London. The Great Fire of London, which occurred in September, is sometimes speculated to have contributed to the end of that particular plague."

"Oi," the Doctor said, "it _did_ help."

Ms. Frizzle raised her eyebrows. "Are you sure you aren't a bit biased in that assessment, trying to ease a guilty conscience?"

"Guilty conscience?" the Doctor repeated indignantly. "I couldn't possibly have prevented that!" He shook his head adamantly. "No, I know it helped because I was there. Besides, sterilization and all that. It was bound to help."

Dorothy Ann finally put her books aside and asked, "So how often have aliens influenced our history and our legends without our realizing it?"

"Oh," the Doctor said, scratching his head, "I haven't exactly kept count."

"But we haven't any records that I can find," she protested. "Not even tales that imply alien involvement, at least not for most things."

"Well," the Doctor said, "that's what happens when you block out anything that doesn't seem to quite fit into your version of the world. You only see what you want to see, and you can't find what you don't look for. That's why you need to keep an open mind."

He kept going back to that lesson, Tim noticed. It was more his lesson than any lecture on mysteries or aliens or anything else. He seemed desperate that they not forget that. After all, if they didn't, they wouldn't forget any of this, either, no matter what pressures the world put on them, or whatever the Doctor's reason was for believing they'd ignore the magic in their field trips.

He didn't want to think he'd be one of those people. He may not have his head in the clouds as often as other people did, but he certainly wasn't the sort of person who willingly had the wool pulled over his eyes. He liked having all the facts. It didn't matter if other people disputed those facts, or the impossible ways he got them, so long as he knew they were true. Their field trips were something to treasure. They all knew how lucky they were to be in Ms. Frizzle's class. Even their parents had had a taste of her teachings once, though they had, Tim remembered, been a bit more straightforward than the field trips they took.

For all the parents, at least. He and the rest of the class had gone so far as to become bats to learn about the creatures that night. It was a memorable night for parent and child, yes, but for different reasons.

There was a knock at the door, and then Principal Ruhle stuck his head in the door. "Ms. Frizzle? I meant to…." He stopped when he spotted the Doctor. "Oh, you are still here."

"Yup," the Doctor said, popping the 'p'. "That's not a problem, is it?"

"Well, no, but, if you'll forgive me, I have to say that you must have prepared a rather long speech for a class of eight year olds," Mr. Ruhle said, coming into the classroom and closing the door behind him.

"Well, it was more of an ongoing lesson than a lecture," the Doctor explained. "Takes more time that way, but I think I've taught them a lesson they won't forget anytime soon."

"Have you, now?" Mr. Ruhle asked. Turning to the class, he asked, "And what is that?"

The class exchanged glances, much as they had when the Doctor had first asked them about their field trips, and then Ralphie said, against what might have been his better judgement, "Aliens exist, and the Doctor's one of them."

"An alien?" Mr. Ruhle asked, raising his eyebrows and looking at the Doctor over the rims of his glasses.

The Doctor looked surprised. "Did I ever say that?" he asked, winking at Ms. Frizzle.

"Sure you did," Keesha said. "You went on about it for about ten minutes."

"Why would I do a thing like that?" the Doctor wondered. "I mean, we were talking about mysteries—that was the point—and you wanted to know a bit more about aliens, but I never told you any tall tales, now did I?"

Mr. Ruhle chuckled. "Kids these days," he said, smiling and shaking his head. "Do you know, they once tried to tell me that they went inside a chicken to find me a Rhode Island Red to replace my prize rooster, Giblets, and that they left Arnold inside an egg to see what happened before it hatched. They told me a splendid tale full of facts to display what they'd learned. They're an imaginative bunch, aren't they?"

"Oh, yes," the Doctor agreed. "And I wouldn't have it any other way."

"I think we've been Frizzled," Tim whispered, even though he was perfectly aware that he usually reserved that turn of phrase for some of the stranger things that had happened to them on one of Ms. Frizzle's field trips as opposed to when they were safely in the classroom. If Keesha hadn't suddenly started accepting the Doctor's words after she'd listened to her heart—and his—he might have wondered if she was the one who had been right all along to demand proof of it all beyond the Doctor's words.

"More like Doctored," Carlos whispered in response. Tim silently agreed with that assessment; the Doctor had spent longer than the ten minutes Keesha had claimed going on about aliens and the importance of keeping an open mind rather than closing yourself off to the world, and now he was as good as ignoring all of that—and everything else he had been going on about.

But he wasn't, Tim noted, exactly _denying_ any of it. He was just avoiding it, choosing his words carefully so that it sounded as if they had invented the notion that he was an alien.

He was, in short, showing them how easy it was to avoid the truth, to willingly twist your words so that they fit in with the practicality of someone else's blinded reality.

And if it was so easy to do, it would be just as easy to fall into the trap of doing so, perhaps without even realizing it.

Well, he wouldn't. He'd make sure of that. Somehow. He might even draw out a comic for each and every field trip, like he had with Ralphie and Weatherman, because then he'd know, if he ever had reason to feign doubt, that it was better to accept impossible truths than to take the consequences of false ignorance with all its blinded views. He was lucky enough to know that reality, as so many people saw it, wasn't quite complete. He knew that that extra little element, a bit of magic, was needed to round things off. If he'd found it, if he'd been offered it now, he had no reason to ever let it go, no matter what other people thought.

* * *

A/N: So, as we get nearer and nearer to the end, the Doctor's lesson finally becomes clear. Well, for Tim, at least. I think you guys might've figured it out beforehand. Anyway, thanks to everyone who is taking the time to review.


	11. Chapter 11: Dorothy Ann

Dorothy Ann loved words. She loved the written word, she loved the spoken word, and she even loved all the little intricacies of words and how they were formed. She loved exploring the hidden shades of meaning in a particular passage in her books, trying to guess at the writer's opinion of the work even when said writer was trying to remain unbiased. She loved words nearly as much as she loved science.

She knew, given the power of words, that there was truth in the old saying that the pen was mightier than the sword. Words could be sharp. They could cut right to your core. But some words could be gentle and build you up. And some words, like the ones the Doctor was using now, were the sort that reminded you that however well words could be woven to form the cloth of a wonderful yarn, they sometimes only remain nothing more than words.

But wasn't that thought, reminded a quiet voice in her head in what sounded suspiciously like her mother's calm, disapproving tone, precisely what you were told to avoid? What you promised yourself you _would_ avoid?

Perhaps it was more of a struggle to keep an open mind than she'd thought.

"Are you nearly finished your lesson?" Mr. Ruhle asked. "I was wondering if I could have a word with you."

"Well, I did have a bit more planned," the Doctor said, "but it wasn't really essential. I'm sure Ms. Frizzle can keep things afloat for a few minutes while we have a little chat."

"I can wait," Mr. Ruhle said, though DA doubted he'd really like to, judging from his tone.

"Nah, it's no trouble," the Doctor said, waving it off. "We were just discussing a few different mysteries rather than a particular one at the moment anyhow." With a nod at Ms. Frizzle, he followed Mr. Ruhle from the classroom.

There was a brief period of silence before Wanda spoke what all of them had been thinking: "He wasn't _really_ pulling our legs, was he?"

"He couldn't have been," Ralphie said, but he didn't sound very convincing.

Ms. Frizzle smiled knowingly before calling, "Keesha?"

Keesha shifted uncomfortably in her seat. "I don't think he was," she said. "Making it up, I mean. I don't think he was."

"What did you hear?" Tim asked.

"I don't really know," Keesha admitted. "He doesn't have a normal heartbeat, not like mine. It sounded kind of, I dunno, echoey or something, like there were four beats instead of two."

There was a brief period of silence while everyone digested this information. DA was racking her mind, trying to come up with a medical explanation for that. Irregular heartbeats and heart murmurs or hearts beating too fast or too slow, yes, she'd heard of all that even if she didn't really know anything about it, but a quadruple beat instead of a double one? That didn't make sense. The beat was caused when blood was pumped into the heart and then out of it again. Even if a heart was pumping faster than normal, it wouldn't sound like a series of four beats instead of a series of two.

"I hate to say it," Carlos said, "but the Doctor did already prove to us that he's good at illusions."

Phoebe shook her head. "No, he wouldn't have done something like that. He wants us to believe him, you guys. He doesn't want us to try to find reasons to rule out every other possibility before we believe him."

"But it is just a little convenient, isn't it," Wanda reasoned, picking up Carlos's argument, "that we are supposed to take it all on faith? I mean, he did tell us that proof could be faked. Carlos might have a point."

"Phoebe's the one who's got a point," Arnold said. "We can't just believe him when he's talking to us one minute and then start questioning him the next, as soon as he leaves, and that's what we're doing."

"Do you believe him, then?" Wanda asked.

Arnold deflated a bit. "I'm not sure if I want to," he confessed.

"I do," said Phoebe stubbornly. "And so do you, don't you, Keesh?"

"I think so," Keesha agreed.

"Ralphie?" Phoebe prompted.

"Yeah," Ralphie said, though he still sounded a bit uncertain.

It was that uncertainty that prompted DA to speak up before Phoebe could ask them all in turn whether they believed the Doctor. She wasn't sure of it herself at the moment. "This is what he warned us against," she said. "It hasn't been five minutes and we're already questioning it." She took a breath, then continued, "We have to keep an open mind, and if we do, we can believe that the Doctor's telling the truth. About everything." Feeling the need for support, Dorothy Ann looked at Ms. Frizzle. "Can't we?"

"It's easy to fall into the trap of disbelief," Ms. Frizzle agreed. "How many of you had heard stories about my class before you were part of it and didn't quite believe everything you'd heard?"

From the mumblings and mutterings of the class, DA figured she wasn't the only one who had had her eyes opened on that first day.

But perhaps that's all the Doctor had meant this to be: something to open their eyes to the possibilities out there.

Well, Ms. Frizzle opened their eyes to the possibilities. The Doctor was trying to get them to see the impossibilities, namely the impossibilities that weren't really impossibilities at all. They were just called impossibilities by those who didn't know any better, by those who didn't care to look any further, by those who were content with the proven possibilities and didn't feel the need to seek out the truth of the impossible ones.

She'd thought once that science was built solely on hard and fast facts, but it wasn't. Science was full of mysteries, of phenomena that had never been explained. Some things just were, and no one knew why they were that way. Different hypotheses were put forth and theories were formed, but science wasn't nearly as certain as it looked. A mountain of research could crumble if the fact at its foundation was proven wrong, or at the very least not entirely correct.

It was important not to take things for granted in science. Tests had to be repeated so that the true cause for the observed effect could be determined; otherwise, the wrong conclusion could be drawn. The assumption that everything else in an experiment is equal can't be made; it's the scientist's job to do her best to make all the factors as equal as possible. Error, after all, needed to be minimized or real results would never be realized.

But sometimes…sometimes it wasn't as easy as testing a hypothesis. Sometimes, when you knew the effect, you didn't even know where to begin to guess at its cause. In those cases, you had to examine all the information you had and look for possible causes, and you'd design an experiment to test the most likely ones. But if you refused to acknowledge a potential cause, you might never find the answer you were looking for.

To be a good scientist, you needed to be able to keep an open mind.

The bell rang, and there wasn't one kid in the class who didn't jump. How could school be over already? They'd only just begun to sort everything out. The time couldn't have gone that quickly, could it?

Then again, DA reasoned, Mr. Ruhle wouldn't have interrupted the class if he hadn't thought the Doctor had skipped out without talking to him. She'd guessed, when Carlos had delivered that message, that Mr. Ruhle might want to talk to the Doctor about his lesson. He didn't really like it when things didn't go by the book, though he seemed to give Ms. Frizzle a fair bit of rope when it came to planning their field trips.

Then again, Mr. Ruhle didn't know half of what was behind their field trips, and even when they'd tried to tell him, he hadn't listened.

He hadn't ever learned the lesson the Doctor had taught them today.

Dorothy Ann packed up her books, but as with the rest of the class, she was slow to leave. Maybe time had been compressed again or something. But the bus was sitting in the parking lot, looking as inconspicuous as the rest of the buses and not at all like the magic one it was. Time had flown by in the normal way after all.

"What about you, DA?" Phoebe asked softly. "Do you believe the Doctor?" They were the only two left in the classroom now, except for Liz and Ms. Frizzle. Everyone else had wandered out into the hallway to join the chattering crowds. Arnold might've gone to find Janet, since Janet probably would've demanded an explanation and wouldn't have been satisfied with what Arnold could've given her at lunch. Carlos definitely would've gone to find Mikey. Wanda might have needed to rush home to look after William. Ralphie had soccer practice. Keesha and Tim might still be about, but there was no guarantee of that, either.

"Yeah," Dorothy Ann answered, clutching her books tighter to her chest. They might not hold all the answers, though they'd served her well in the past, but she knew that she could find the answers she wanted if she looked for them. She just needed to be willing to recognize them when she came across them. "Yeah, I do."

Phoebe smiled. "So do I." She paused, then added, "I'm not sure I would've if I'd still been at my old school, though."

DA looked at her curiously. "Why?"

"Because it still sounds like a story," Phoebe said, "and we just dealt with facts there. They were handed to us on a plate sometimes. We didn't have to look for them, at least not all the time, and we certainly didn't experience them like we do here with Ms. Frizzle. I think the older students did more of their own research, but we were told things more often than we were taught them. We were just told that things were this way. We weren't always told why, and knowing why is half of what learning is, isn't it?"

"I guess that's why people always say kids ask a lot of questions," DA commented. "We're trying to learn."

Phoebe nodded in agreement. "Mr. Seedplot was a good teacher, though. I think he was one of the best. He tried to answer our questions as best he could, even when he didn't know the answer."

"That's all anyone can do, isn't it?"

"Yes," Phoebe agreed, "but we learn differently with Ms. Frizzle. I think Mr. Seedplot was trying to give us more hands on lessons, that's why we were gardening so much, but we didn't do nearly what we do with Ms. Frizzle." She smiled. "I guess we're just lucky to be in Ms. Frizzle's class," she added, echoing DA's own sentiments.

They were lucky. Funny, though, that they'd never really questioned it. They'd been suspicious of the Doctor, wondering who he was, but they'd long since given up on wondering about Ms. Frizzle. Well, except for those times when she'd make a comment that didn't quite make sense, or wouldn't if it had been anyone else but her saying it, like her comment to Keesha about seeing footlights all the time when she was a Shakespearian actress. Her past, as far as that went, wasn't very clear, either, though DA had no doubt that she'd come from a family who had the same sort of magic touch that she did.

Her great-great-great-something grandfather Redbeard, after all, had had a magic Spanish galleon as part of his buried treasure, shrunk down in size so that it would fit in the chest he'd left behind. They hadn't known what the ship was even after they had pulled the lever on it, but Ms. Frizzle had recognized it. DA couldn't help but wonder if Murph would have known it with as much certainty as Ms. Frizzle had. Murph had seemed more…. Well, she'd seemed more like most other adults than Ms. Frizzle did. But, DA reasoned, she hadn't been at all fazed when she'd gone on a field trip with them and they'd discovered what would happen if no one recycled anything or even how many things that they used everyday were made from recycled material in the first place. No, Murph had taken everything in stride, much as the Doctor had when they'd gone out into space.

Maybe Murph didn't have the same sort of magic as Ms. Frizzle, then. But she was still aware of it.

Just like they were.

Precisely like they were.

After all, the Doctor had said that it was quite possible to live in what he'd termed the adult world, the one lacking the innate imagination of children, and not be bound by it. They were free to keep their imagination, their hold on possible impossibilities, if they so desired. All they had to do was make sure they didn't let it go.

And if they didn't, well, they might just see a few more truths behind various mysteries than the rest of the world.

* * *

A/N: Okay, I'll admit it, not a lot actually happened in this chapter, but DA thinks things through, so you can't really fault me for this. Not too much, anyway. Right? Well, anyway, thanks to everyone who's been taking the time to review. I really appreciate it.


	12. Chapter 12

"Really," the Doctor said to Principal Ruhle, "I didn't have any intentions of speaking when I first came here. Ms. Frizzle just asked me, and, well, I couldn't say no."

"Valerie can be rather persuasive," Mr. Ruhle agreed. "But I'm sure you realize that I must complete the necessary paperwork if we're to give you anything for your trouble?"

The Doctor grimaced. He really didn't like paperwork. "It's really no trouble at all," he said. "I don't need anything."

Mr. Ruhle looked surprised. "Surely—"

The Doctor cut him off. "Certainly. Absolutely. Positively, definitely, without a doubt. I'm quite content to teach the children something that they'll remember, if I can. That's all the reward I need." It's all he ever usually got, showing people the wonders of the universe and letting them keep the memories of that wonder alive in the stories they told or the way they looked at the world now that they knew how much more there could be.

Well.

That was true for nearly everyone, at least.

Though, on a happier note, it's not like he'd never been thanked. He had been, and he did appreciate it, even if he usually did do what he did quite happily without any recognition.

"That's very generous of you," Mr. Ruhle said.

The Doctor shrugged. "It's the least I can do, really."

"Have you known Valerie long, then?"

"Long?" the Doctor repeated. He'd just met her yesterday. That hardly counted as long in anyone's book, especially his. But Mr. Ruhle didn't need to know that. "Not terribly. Not as long as you have, I'm sure. She was already teaching here when I met her, I mean."

Mr. Ruhle nodded. "She's been here a while now. I haven't been principal for much longer. I do recall that she came with excellent references, though."

"Oh, I don't doubt it," the Doctor said. He didn't, though he really did wonder who had given those references.

Providing those references weren't as genuine as his tended to be, which is to say not at all.

The conversation carried on a little longer before the bell rang and Mr. Ruhle excused himself before the Doctor could extract any more information on Valerie Frizzle, however vague.

The Doctor stuck his hands in his pockets. Someone had to know something around here. Other teachers, perhaps. Maybe the custodian? People had to talk. It was practically human nature.

The Doctor wandered through the crowds of students as they rushed for their lockers to get their bags and head home, hoping to spot a teacher who didn't look to be particularly busy. He finally spotted a man that he pegged as the physical education teacher. Well, if he were to judge solely on appearance. But the man was certainly fit, and a good deal more muscular than he had ever been.

"Hello there," the Doctor said, coming up to him. He pulled out his psychic paper and flashed it at the man, saying, "Doctor John Smith. Education inspector. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions?"

The man looked surprised, but he recovered quickly. "Of course," he said. "I'm the phys ed teacher here, Garth Sinew. What did you want to know?"

"Oh, this and that. Nothing particular. Well, actually, yes, something vaguely particular. I've heard tell of one your colleagues, a Ms. Valerie Frizzle."

Mr. Sinew raised his eyebrows and waited.

"What's your opinion of her?" the Doctor asked.

"As a person or as a teacher?"

"Well, both, really."

"From what I hear, she's popular with the students," he said. "She does take them on more field trips than anyone else and doesn't always clear it with Principal Ruhle, so I can't say I particularly approve of her methods, but her students certainly learn the material, so I can't fault her for that. She's also a formidable opponent; she even beat me at the annual teacher-athalon, and that's not something I can say about too many people."

All good information, the Doctor thought, but not what he was looking for. He asked a few more questions before moving on, hoping to catch someone else. Most of the students were gone now, either on their way home or gathering for one after school activity or another in one of the classrooms. It was a few minutes before he saw anyone else, though the cleaning supplies gave the man away as the custodian immediately.

The Doctor introduced himself as a health and safety inspector. Taking three different guises in the same building wasn't something he usually did, but he'd learned that it was best to play the role people expected when he started asking questions. Besides, it didn't matter too much; by the time they all sorted out that it had been him all along, he'd be long gone.

The custodian, who introduced himself as Mr. McClean, had nothing but praises for Ms. Frizzle and her class once the Doctor managed to work the conversation around to them. "They've made a few messes like everyone else," he said, "but they're pretty good at cleaning them up, too." They had even, he said, set up Mr. Ruhle's new fangled computer to do some of the morning chores that went along with opening the school. It had been, he'd said, a rotating job between classrooms. There wasn't too much involved—putting on the coffee in the staff room, opening the school doors, raising the flag, turning on the lawn sprinklers, making the morning announcement—but they'd realized a way to save time and labour, with the help of that Mikey Ramon, whom the Doctor deduced was Carlos's younger brother. There'd been a bit of trouble at first, before they'd sorted out the programming, but they'd had everything working properly once the rest of the students had started to arrive.

That, Mr. McClean said, was a good show of ingenuity if he'd ever seen one.

Mr. McClean followed this by extolling the virtues of Walkerville Elementary in terms of its heath and safety standards, and the Doctor acted suitably impressed and let the custodian show him various features of the school, which he made a show of inspecting and finding it all in order. There wasn't anything that he'd never seen before, which was unsurprising, but it was all quite impressive for a school, he supposed.

"If you look at the safety of the students in terms of their transport to and from school," Mr. McClean added, "you'll want to talk to Mr. Junkett. He does most of the repair work around here when it comes to the mechanics of the school buses and such. He's the vehicle maintenance inspector."

"Is he?" the Doctor said. Excellent. Perhaps he'd had a look at Ms. Frizzle's particular bus. Then again, if he just saw what the Doctor had seen when he'd looked, it wouldn't help much at all. He really ought to get another look at that bus. He was certain he'd know what to look for this time. "Any idea where I can find him?"

"He's out in the yard now," Mr. McClean replied. "Staff parking lot, actually. Mr. Ruhle had a bit of trouble with his car and called in a favour."

"Brilliant. I'm sure he'll spare me a few minutes for a chat. Thank you."

As luck would have it, Mr. Junkett had just finished up with Principle Ruhle's car. The Doctor took the opportunity to corner him and ask about the school buses. When he saw the right opening in the conversation, he asked, "There's the one teacher, Ms. Frizzle, isn't it, who takes her students on an awful lot of field trips? You ought to see the wear and tear on her school bus then, wouldn't you?"

"You'd think," Mr. Junkett replied, sounding almost bitter, "but lately all I've found are a few low tires. I did condemn it once, though. It was a mess. The springs were sprung, the seats were saggy, the fenders were dented, the spark plugs were shot, there was acid all over the paint, and that's not the least of it. I couldn't even believe it ran. It should've been sent to the junkyard long before that."

The Doctor raised his eyebrows. "I didn't realize they'd gotten a new bus."

"They didn't," Mr. Junkett said.

"Oh?"

"I had it in the junkyard, seconds away from being pounded into scrap metal, but I guess they managed to get it going." He shook his head and took a bite out of his peanut butter sandwich. "Ms. Fizzle managed it, I suppose. Don't know how. She must've gotten parts from somewhere. It wouldn't have run otherwise."

"You disapprove?" the Doctor guessed.

Mr. Junkett snorted. "I'm still not entirely convinced it's safe, but I went over it again once she got it running and I couldn't find anything specifically wrong. The engine ran like a dream. I'll give that to Ms. Frizzle; she knows her stuff."

"Yes, she does, doesn't she?" the Doctor agreed absently. From what he could tell, no one else, the vehicle maintenance inspector included, knew about the magic school bus. He ought to have noticed a few extra parts in it, like the mesmoglobber that allowed for the bus's molecular configuration to change so that it could become, well, anything from a school bus to a spaceship. If he hadn't, since he didn't appear to think Ms. Frizzle's bus was out of the ordinary, or at least not that the Doctor could tell, then whatever mechanisms Ms. Frizzle had hiding in the depths of her bus hadn't been uncovered by anyone else.

After leaving Mr. Junkett and his peanut butter sandwich in peace, the Doctor headed back to where Ms. Frizzle had left the bus, hoping it would still be there.

It was.

And so was she.

"Isn't it better," Ms. Frizzle asked, "to question the person you want the answers from instead of everyone else?"

"Well, you weren't exactly forthcoming before," the Doctor said.

Ms. Frizzle chuckled. "I was as forthcoming as you ever are. I'm surprised you told my students as much as you did."

"I did what I had to," the Doctor replied. "I don't think any of them are going to forget it any time soon, do you?"

"I hope not," Ms. Frizzle said quietly.

Ms. Frizzle, the Doctor quickly realized, seemed to be waiting for him to ask the questions. So he asked them. "How did you get a magic school bus, anyway?"

"With a bit of luck," Ms. Frizzle replied. "The good sort, not the bad."

"That's not an answer."

"Isn't it? I rather thought it was. If I hadn't had any good luck, I wouldn't have gotten it."

Good grief, she was as bad as he was when it came to answering questions. Or just as good at avoiding it, anyway. "But how did you actually get it?"

A smile. "How did you get your ship, Doctor?"

"That's not pertinent."

"You're asking me about my transport. Can't I ask you about yours?"

The Doctor sighed. A question for a question. Well, he couldn't argue about its fairness. "I borrowed her."

"Borrowed?"

"All right, stole, but only because I never got around to returning her." Well, he wouldn't have gotten around to returning her for a long time, and he hadn't exactly asked permission, but still.

"You had no intentions of returning her, did you?"

"No," the Doctor admitted. "Not, well…. All right. No."

"And now you can't."

No. No, he couldn't. Even if he _had _wanted to. Gallifrey was—

Hold on.

How did _she_ know that?

The Doctor went very still. "How do you know that?" he asked quietly.

"I have many friends, Doctor, as do you. I've heard stories."

"You knew it was me from the start, then?" the Doctor surmised, remembering how she'd never called him Dr. Smith. He had no doubt that she was telling the truth. Stories were told. And with the sort of company she must keep, well, some of those stories would even be believed.

"I had my suspicions."

"But you didn't tell anyone else?"

"What was I to do, ask if anyone had happened across a blue box? No, I had no need to do that, Doctor. You confirmed who you were quickly enough."

Oh, he could only hope his enemies couldn't pinpoint him so quickly. "What gave me away?"

Ms. Frizzle laughed. "Your manner," she replied, "and your smile, and your eyes. It is not one thing, Doctor, but a combination of everything that makes you you, no matter what face you wear."

"And what makes you you, Ms. Valerie Frizzle? The twinkle in your eye?"

Another laugh, with that telltale twinkle making its appearance. "We are who we are: whoever we make ourselves to be."

Oh, if he didn't know any better, he'd say she was like him. Not necessarily a Time Lady, no, though he expected she would have gotten along quite well with Romana; rather, he'd think that she wasn't everything she appeared to be—namely, an ordinary human. Except he did know better; he'd checked, after all—just surreptitiously while they were still bounding around the various planets in the Milky Way, of course—and she was. Human, at least. Certainly not ordinary, no. Nor unique, come to that. He'd met people like her before, the people who could reach out and grasp the magic that was left in this world.

He always loved meeting those people. They all had their own stories. There was Mary Poppins—yes, she _was_ real, regardless of what people would like to say; the lovely Ms. Travers had simply been the one lucky enough to get part of her story out of her—or had it been from one of her past charges? He couldn't recall, but he'd been delighted to meet her acquaintance. He'd even gone so far as to offer her a trip or two, but she'd declined; it wasn't proper, she'd said, to go gallivanting off like that. 'Twasn't ladylike. Of course, the wind had still been easterly; he'd always wondered if that had been why she'd been so adamant. Then again, that was her character. She opened the eyes of children and adults alike to the wonders of the world around them and then promptly refused to admit she'd done any such thing.

He'd happened across another nanny on the other side of the pond once who'd been like her. Phoebe Figallily. Same gift with animals as the practically perfect Mary Poppins, though she perhaps displayed a slightly gentler touch with the children in her charge. Phoebe had never come off as quite as stern as Mary, in his opinion, though she could certainly hold her own when it came to it. And eccentric family members who made the both of them look positively normal, oh yes. He actually wouldn't have been surprised if he found out that the two of them were cousins. For all the years between the two meetings of those particular women, he wouldn't call it impossible by any means. They took the impossible and made it happen. And he'd found that time was often…_gentler_ on those sorts of people.

Of course, time _was_ a bit fickle; things weren't always that way. He'd met some people who had discovered something hidden in its folds and been changed because of it, some to lesser extents than others. The four Pevensie children, for instance, though he'd only met the one shortly after she'd received news with which he was all too familiar. She'd told him so much then, things that she'd said she hadn't believed in years, had refused to acknowledge. Even her cousin and his friend had been drawn into it, finding a connection to a hidden world in quite the same way her family had with the dear professor (and later his own childhood friend Polly) when they'd been sent to the country during the war, but she'd deliberately separated herself, and now all she had were regrets.

He remembered that he'd had a long conversation with her about regrets and choices and opportunities, but it had been a while back now. He wondered how she was getting on, now that some time had passed, now that she'd had time to get used to the fact that the walls between the worlds were tightly shut and were destined to remain so and that she was trapped on the wrong side of it. Not that it was something anyone could really get used to. He'd offered her the only thing he could: the cold comfort in the truth that once the final door was opened, you could go wherever you wished most.

Well. He wasn't _certain_ that it was the truth. But he'd had that impression, once. It was never any more than a vague impression, admittedly, but…. But it was easier to pretend to believe in what may be a lie than to admit what he'd done to far too many people if it wasn't true.

And there were others; some he'd met, some he hadn't. He knew of a few he hadn't managed to track down. There was Wendy Darling, for one, though he was quite certain she wasn't a Darling anymore. Still. She and her siblings were more like the Pevensies, sharing stories rather than directly using their own brand of magic to open the eyes and hearts of the people around them.

At least they still had stories to share, though; he'd heard tell of some who had forgotten the entirety of the true wonder they'd discovered, like the three Drew children and the Davies boy, though the other child of their group—who was, from one perspective, hardly more of a child than he was—knew the tale, even if he didn't tell it to more than a very select few. People like that were never quite the same afterwards, though, and things were still shared, still spread, whether the doing of it was intentional or not. Granted, as far as intentionally spreading it went, a teacher wasn't much different from a nanny. Lessons were learned and young imaginations encouraged in both cases, more often than not.

They all seemed to share common traits, these people. They were clever and kind, strict when they needed to be and usually able to spot a lie a mile off, given their own past practice of telling them. More often than not, they were full of surprises and determined to make sure lessons were learned. And most importantly of all, they were touched—marked, blessed, whatever you liked to call it—with a special bit of something extra that seemed like magic to any child's eyes. It wasn't really magic, of course. But…it was near enough, being as close to something that doesn't really exist on this particular world as something can be when it stubbornly does exist, contrary to all the rules of the harsh reality of the adult world.

The Doctor sighed. He had a feeling Ms. Frizzle wouldn't answer his questions even if she'd invited him to ask them. She'd only tell if it suited her purpose. And, well, right now he rather doubted it did.

Perhaps this is what he got for going off and leaving all those people with questions about him. It was probably high time he got a taste of his own medicine.

It was a good deal harder to swallow than anything Mary Poppins had ever poured out of her medicine bottle.

"Will you at least tell me," the Doctor asked, "how you managed to get something that compresses time like that?"

"You mean you don't care to guess?"

"Would I ask if I cared to guess?"

"I suppose not."

This statement was followed by such a long stretch of silence that the Doctor was beginning to think she'd decided not to answer the question.

He started debating his options of what to say next, if she wouldn't even answer that.

"I got it," Ms. Frizzle finally replied, "from the same place I got these earrings."

The Doctor raised his eyebrows but studied her earrings more closely in case they gave him a particular clue.

They didn't. They were large, probably lightweight plastic, and moulded into the shape of question marks. No hints of anything alien in the workmanship; they were products of Earth, all right. On someone else, they might have looked tacky. On Ms. Frizzle? They were awfully fitting.

"That doesn't help me," the Doctor said.

"It should."

The Doctor heaved another sigh. "Why not just tell it to me straight, for once? You're a teacher; you ought to be capable of that."

A smile. "They were gifts, Doctor."

"From Great Aunt Enigma?"

Another lilting laugh as Ms. Frizzle shook her head. "No. From you."

* * *

A/N: For anyone who's wondering, the references, in order of appearance, are _Mary Poppins_, _Nanny and the Professor_, _The Chronicles of Narnia_, _Peter Pan_, and _The Dark is Rising _series—although I could have included many more! Thanks to everyone who takes the time to review.


	13. Chapter 13: Phoebe

It was Phoebe's turn to talk to the producer about their latest field trip. Ms. Frizzle would talk to him after, but they'd felt it was important to get the perspective of the students. It helped them, the producer had explained when they'd first begun producing the show, to understand the best way to write everything down into a proper script.

Phoebe wasn't entirely sure, though, that the producer actually knew the truth behind the magic school bus. Ms. Frizzle had been the first one to ever speak to the producers, and she'd never revealed exactly what she'd said. All Phoebe had known was that if everyone agreed, they would go ahead into production. Of course, they'd all been willing to take part when Ms. Frizzle described the idea for the show. It was a wonderful opportunity for students and staff alike.

Their parents had had a few more conservative ideas, but they'd warmed to the idea. Ms. Frizzle could talk anyone into anything.

But Phoebe knew _her_ parents certainly didn't know that the tales of the magic school bus weren't just tales, and she doubted anyone else's did, either.

Most of the adults just thought the idea of the magic school bus was an embellishment to the story. It kept things interesting and allowed them to delve into various topics in science in whatever way necessary. It was an element of the show that, contradictory as it was to the science part of its content, made everything work. It complemented things, and it allowed for impossible things to happen while the possible was explored.

Well, at least that's what Phoebe thought they thought.

After all, even the producer had assumed, the first time they'd revealed a field trip to him, that they'd already embellished the story, adding their own imaginative touch to it.

They hadn't.

This field trip, as far as Phoebe was concerned, proved that.

After all, if they'd never actually gone to any of the other planets, they would never have left anything behind and they would never have needed to return to clean it all up.

But that was all their field trip had consisted of, really. They'd gone back to the classroom after that.

"That's it?" the producer asked, after Phoebe had related the last of the details.

Phoebe nodded.

"You picked up everything you'd left on Pluto, put it back, and that was it?"

"We didn't go to Jupiter," Phoebe said, "and we did look for aliens when we stopped on each of the planets."

"No shrinking or turning into anything? No science lessons? Just 'don't litter'?"

Phoebe nodded again.

"And that was your entire day?"

"It was the entire field trip," Phoebe said. "But we got back before lunch."

"And what happened for the rest of the day?"

"The Doctor talked to us about mysteries," Phoebe answered, twisting her fingers together. "Aliens, of course, and the Loch Ness Monster and things like that."

The producer sighed. "You'd best tell me about that, then."

So Phoebe did.

All of it.

The producer stopped her halfway through, saying, "He said he's an alien?"

"A Time Lord, specifically," Phoebe clarified.

The producer shook his head. "Oh, that man is impossible."

"I think that was his point," Phoebe said.

"In retrospect, I should've realized he was going to do something like that," the producer commented.

"Really?" Phoebe asked. "Why?"

"He came here with some crazy story about a girl who'd phoned him by mistake to complain about one of our episodes," the producer said. "He started asking me questions, but when I realized what he was after, I told him to go talk to Ms. Frizzle."

"So they didn't know each other beforehand?" Phoebe asked. She'd really thought they had, even after the Doctor had revealed himself to be an alien. Ms. Frizzle knew all sorts of people, after all. It wouldn't have been terribly surprising to learn that she knew an alien. If anyone did, she would. It was rather surprising to learn that she didn't. Well, not before today, anyway.

"Not from the sounds of things," the producer replied. He shifted a bit in his chair and picked up his pen again to continue jotting down notes. "All right. Go on."

Phoebe finished her tale, which really was just an ordinary day at school for her now, even though it never would have been anything even remotely close to an ordinary day at her old school. With Ms. Frizzle, one never knew what to expect. In comparison to some of their field trips in the past, this was actually among the more ordinary ones.

Well, except for the part where the Doctor had admitted that he wasn't human, even though he looked it.

"The Doctor sure seems to have stressed the bit about you remembering the magic of your school days, hasn't he?" the producer said, looking over his notes again.

"He doesn't want us to forget it, or, worse yet, ignore it," Phoebe agreed.

"Hmm." The producer finished looking things over, then looked up at her and smiled. "Thanks, Phoebe. I'll talk to Ms. Frizzle and maybe the Doctor and we'll see what we can come up with for an episode."

"You're welcome," Phoebe said politely.

As Phoebe headed home, she wondered about the producer's various remarks. He hadn't believed the Doctor, either. That was rather surprising to her, too. He wasn't like Mr. Ruhle, or at least he'd never struck her as that sort of person. He didn't humour her or any of the rest of them like Mr. Ruhle did. He usually did believe what they said.

Then again, he probably usually believed that they'd already added in the more unbelievable parts on their own. Either Ms. Frizzle never corrected him or he never listened. Maybe he'd thought announcing that the Doctor wasn't native to Earth was a bit of a stretch, even for them.

It was unfortunate. He usually seemed to keep such an open mind, happily grilling them about how they would plan to do something or checking their facts to see what they'd learned that day and making sure that they really understood the lesson that they'd been taught regardless of the material itself. Maybe he was more bound to reality than he liked to think. There were probably plenty of adults who believed they were doing one thing—namely, keeping an open mind—when they were really already building up the walls the Doctor had talked about to keep the unbelievable stuff out.

She hoped she wouldn't be one of those adults.

"Phoebe, haven't you made it home yet?"

Phoebe looked up and around and realized that she'd just walked past the Doctor, of all people. She smiled and shook her head. "I had to talk to the producer first. He wanted to know about our field trip so they can write the next show."

The Doctor's smile faltered. "And you told him?" he asked, though he rather sounded like he didn't want to hear the answer.

"Of course," Phoebe answered.

"Everything?"

Now Phoebe felt confused. "Wasn't I supposed to?"

"Well, yes, I suppose." The Doctor rubbed the back of his neck. "Blimey, I didn't think of that."

"Think of what?"

The Doctor opened his mouth, and it took him a while to work his way around to an answer. "Ah, oh, well, just that…. Well, you know, that…that this would be an episode."

"But the producer said you'd talked to him, and to Ms. Frizzle, before you came to class. Didn't you know?"

"If I'd thought about it, I might've," the Doctor said. "Well, all right, I would've. But I didn't think about it until just now, so no, I didn't know."

"Oh." Phoebe wondered if she'd just told the producer something the Doctor had wanted to keep secret. Funny he wouldn't tell them if that were the case, though. But she couldn't take her words back, so it was too late now. "I'm sorry. I'm sure the producer will understand if you tell him he can't use today's field trip as a show."

"No," the Doctor decided after a moment. "No, I won't do that. It's better for this to be out there, isn't it? It might help a few more children cherish their childhood or a few more adults remember the magic in theirs." He started to grin. "You know, that idea's rather growing on me. Mysteries! Wonderful subject matter, don't you think?"

"I liked your lesson, if that's what you mean," Phoebe said. "I promise I'll remember it."

"See that you do," the Doctor said. "I'd hate for you to choose otherwise."

"I won't," promised Phoebe.

The Doctor grinned at her, the same goofy grin he'd worn many a time that day. "No," he agreed happily, "you won't. And the world's all the better for it, I'm sure."

The Doctor didn't seem to be in any hurry, so Phoebe asked, "Are you leaving now?" She wasn't sure what he was up to. Off to his ship, she supposed. Where he went after that was anyone's guess.

"Well," the Doctor admitted, bouncing on his heels a bit, "that had been my initial plan."

"And now it's not?" Phoebe guessed.

"Nah," the Doctor said, shaking his head. "I don't have anything pressing on my plate. I can hang around for a bit, see if I can help with anything. Maybe if I stick around and ask a few more questions, I'll get closer to solving a few mysteries myself." He paused, but it wasn't a long enough pause for Phoebe to ask what mysteries he'd been looking into while in Walkerville—especially since the only thing that came to mind was the mystery of the Monster of Walker Lake, and they'd solved that one a while back now. "Or," the Doctor added, "they just might let me choose the title for the episode." Another pause, this one longer than the last. "What do you think my chances are of that last one?"

"Naming the episode?" Phoebe clarified. "I'm not sure. Maybe if you ask nicely?"

"Maybe," the Doctor agreed. "Hopefully. I'll have to make a point of that, though. I have a terrible tendency to be rude without noticing."

"What would you name it if they let you choose?" Phoebe asked.

"Oh, I dunno," the Doctor said. "I haven't really thought about it yet. I suppose 'Meets the Doctor' isn't much of a title, is it? 'The Magic School Bus Meets the Doctor'?" He shook his head. "Nah. Maybe if I'd run into you on one of your field trips, but not this way, not when I came to you first. Something about mysteries, perhaps. That's what this was about, after all. Mysteries and imagination." He frowned. "Can't even call it 'The Mystery of the Blue Box' when I didn't even show you my ship."

"Your ship's a blue box?"

"Yes. Did you see her? Parked in the corner of the producer's office? Doesn't mean anything if you didn't; you're not supposed to, really. Perception filter and all that; supposed to make it so you just ignore her."

"A box?" Phoebe repeated. She couldn't recall seeing anything, but then she hadn't been looking, either. "No. But…how can your ship be a box?"

"Oi, don't be judgemental. She's a very special box," the Doctor said. "The TARDIS is about as special a box as your bus is a school bus." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "Maybe I shouldn't try to come up with a title. I'm rubbish at titles."

"They're not that hard," Phoebe said. "You just pick whatever seems best."

"That's the trouble; I don't know what _is_ best. Normally, I'd say it'd be something along the lines of the lesson, but I can't come up with a good title for that." He paused. "Can you?"

Phoebe started, surprised to be put on the spot like that. "I'm not sure. I haven't thought about it, either. We don't title the episodes." She thought for a moment. "Maybe you should relate the title to the reason you came here. 'Mysteries' or some such thing."

"The reason I came here?" the Doctor repeated. "Well, to be perfectly honest, I came to see if I could solve the mystery behind your magic school bus." He stopped, frowned, and then said, "Well, actually, no, it's not."

"It's not?"

"No," the Doctor murmured. "I came here because someone just like you phoned the wrong number."

"You did?" Phoebe prompted.

"Yes. If I hadn't gotten that phone call, I would never have come." The Doctor grinned again. "Well, can't say I regret coming. I don't. And I don't think I'm going to regret staying around for a few more days, either. Thank you, Phoebe. You're absolutely brilliant, you know that? Thanks to you, I've got a title to argue for. And I'm awfully good at winning arguments."

"You've picked a title?" Phoebe asked, wondering when he'd had time to do that. Thirty seconds earlier, he hadn't come up with anything. Certainly nothing she had said could have changed that, could it?

"Yup," the Doctor said. "As you said, if I can't find the title in the content, I should turn to the reason I'm here. And that's because of a wrong number. That's as good a title as any, isn't it? 'Wrong Number'?"

From the way he was grinning, Phoebe suspected that he didn't want her actual opinion on that, so she smiled and politely agreed. After all, he could have picked a worse title. This one wasn't that bad, really. Besides, it was rather funny to think that all of this had happened because someone had phoned the wrong number.

The Doctor offered to walk her home, saying he'd welcome the company if she didn't mind, so she let him, and he chattered away all the way to her house and nearly didn't stop when they got there. She felt obliged to invite him in, but he declined, which was just as well, because she wasn't sure what she would have told her parents if he'd decided to accept.

Granted, from the way the Doctor kept talking, he would probably have made all the necessary explanations for her.

Once the Doctor finally finished his explanation as to why the sky was blue, since he seemed to have forgotten by now that they'd already learned about the visible spectrum and all the colours hidden within white light, she slipped inside and called out a greeting to her parents.

"Hi, honey," her mother called from the kitchen. "What did you learn in school today?"

Phoebe smiled, and then she replied, "We had a guest speaker today, and he told us all about mysteries." About how to spot them, or to spot the answers to them, if they looked for them, and how imagination and belief and all the wonders of childhood shouldn't be forgotten or ignored, and how the impossible isn't necessarily impossible at all.

Like all of the lessons she learned in Ms. Frizzle's class, it wasn't something she'd soon forget.

After all, she'd promised she wouldn't, and she meant to keep that promise.

* * *

A/N: All right, I had a bit of fun in the middle there regarding the title (since I really am rubbish at titles), but it was all in the interest of melding the impossible parts of the show with the possible parts of the show. And a half-hearted attempt at metafiction, I suppose. Thanks to everyone who's been reading and reviewing.


	14. Chapter 14

It was a while later, after they'd filmed the latest episode and aired it in such a short span of time that it surprised even him, that the Doctor was back in the producer's office. Normally, he would've left long before, but his conversation with Phoebe had only served to remind him that he wasn't really in any rush. After all, all he had to get back to was more of what he'd been doing when he'd first gotten the phone call that had led him here in the first place, and that wasn't much of anything to rush back to.

Besides, Ms. Frizzle had put him up for a few days when he'd asked. He hadn't learned everything he'd wanted to know, not by a long shot, but he had gotten something he'd wanted: a good, long conversation.

He liked those conversations. He really ought to try to have more of them. Shame things had a tendency of popping up and interrupting whenever a conversation showed promise of turning into a particularly good one.

Thankfully, he'd gotten through another good, long conversation without that happening.

He hadn't gotten all the answers he'd wanted, but beggars couldn't be choosers.

Unfortunately.

Anyway, he was now waiting with the producer to see how the show would be received. Children call in, the producer had explained, to share their thoughts and get answers to their questions about the show. Since the Doctor had become such an important part to this particular show, the producer had thought it would be nice if he'd join him, and the Doctor was delighted to do so.

Besides, the TARDIS was still sitting quietly in the corner of the room, and as far as the Doctor could tell, the perception filter was working perfectly.

The first order of business, it seemed, was to tidy up the mess. If he left it any longer, the producer said, his colleague would have a thing or two to say about it. According to her, it was his turn to clean up. She'd done it often enough without his help, so he could very well try going about it without her. He was, apparently, too much of a packrat for her tastes.

"When _was_ the last time you cleaned up in here, anyway?" the Doctor asked, flipping through a pile of scripts. He couldn't really talk, but the TARDIS wasn't terribly messy. Well, all right, Romana would've had a few words to say about him and his affection for clutter, but he at least knew where everything was in the TARDIS.

Well. Almost everything. There were a few things he hadn't seen for a few years now. His copy of _The Time Machine_ had gone off somewhere. He couldn't recall where he'd put his cricket bat. He knew he had a few opened and only partially empty bags of jelly babies floating around. His red yo-yo wasn't with the others. He also couldn't recall the last time he'd been in the music room, but to his knowledge, he still had one. It would be nice to find it; he had a music stand to put back in it, the one he'd found in storage, and a few compositions he wouldn't mind plunking out on the piano to see if he liked the melody as much as he thought he did.

"It has been a while," the producer admitted, "but in my defence, I'm not the only one using this office."

The Doctor glanced at the desk that belonged to the other producer. It was still covered in papers like the rest of the office, but it looked slightly more organized than everything else. By the computer, there was a picture of Liz with a smiling woman, taken somewhere in the wilderness, to judge by the tent in the background. "She off on vacation?" he guessed.

"Checking up on Bella and Herman, actually," the producer replied. At the Doctor's blank look, he added, "Bella was Wanda's frog; after she was released, my esteemed colleague saw the opportunity to get reacquainted with the great outdoors on a regular basis and leave me to tidy up the office mess."

"She call it the office mess or your mess?" the Doctor asked. He had enough experience with companions complaining about the mess in the TARDIS, even when it wasn't a mess at all. After all, the rooms that were filled to the ceiling were storage rooms. They were supposed to be like that, weren't they? It wasn't as if he wasn't the slightest bit organized. A post-it note or two or three on the door would tell him what the room contained.

Well, until he lost the post-it note or forgot to make one.

Still. Point was, the TARDIS was not a mess, not like this was. After all, he could always find room for the bits and bobs he'd accumulated. Even Donna had been quite good at it, judging by the amount of things she'd moved from the boot of her car into the TARDIS…. Most of that was _still_ in the TARDIS, come to that. As were a number of Rose's things. Even Martha had forgotten a couple things, though she'd had the chance to find most of her belongings. Not like—

"Mine," the producer admitted, blessedly interrupting the Doctor's thoughts. "Thankfully, Liz here knows that's a lie, so she's agreed to help."

At present, Liz was admiring her reflection in the blank computer screen.

"Providing," the producer added, "that I give her a few treats in return."

Upon hearing this, Liz quickly scampered to the nearest pile of papers and set about straightening it.

Oh, yes. That was familiar enough. "No such thing as a free lunch," the Doctor commented. He'd gotten into enough messes to know the meaning of that particular economics phrase. It went along the same lines as something being too good to be true. It was a rare thing indeed to truly get something for nothing.

The producer checked his watch, then said, "Shouldn't be long now." He accepted a pile of scripts from the Doctor and put them into a box to be kept, the Doctor suspected, in the corner of the room. Once that corner was available again, of course. But with the clutter and knickknacks and loose papers everywhere, the producer didn't seem to notice that the corner was currently occupied.

Well, if he did, he didn't comment on it.

Ah, well. He'd realize soon enough. The Doctor wasn't planning on sticking around for too much longer now.

It was, as the producer had predicted, not long before the first phone call came in. The Doctor had his hands full at the moment—with a globe in one hand and the bridge he'd seen when he'd first come in, the one built out of bobby pins and gumdrops, in the other—and Liz was scurrying around, trying to collect all the marbles that had fallen out of the bag she'd been tugging on, so the producer was the one to answer the phone. "Hello, _Magic School Bus_," he said after he'd hit the speakerphone button.

"Hi," a boy said. "I wanted to ask why you didn't have many actual science lessons in the episode. I was looking forward to seeing an adventure, but they hardly even left the classroom, and when they were in space, they only went to the planets in the solar system again."

"We took a bit of a different tack with this episode," the producer explained. "So much of science is unexplained and left in mystery; we were trying to explore a bit of that."

"And," the Doctor added, jumping into the conversation, "I'd argue that science needs imagination, wouldn't you? If you can't imagine the possibility, you can never realize it, and if you can't imagine possible answers to explain a mystery, you'll have an awful time trying to solve it and I doubt you'd be very successful."

"Yes," the producer agreed, shooting the Doctor a sideways glance, "imagination does play a substantial role in most of our episodes. It's an important part of childhood."

"Of life," the Doctor corrected.

There was a pause. "Oh," the boy finally said.

"Anything else?" the Doctor asked cheerfully.

Another pause. "No, I guess not. Thanks."

"You're welcome," the Doctor said, grinning as he reached over to end the call.

The producer raised an eyebrow at him. "Are you manning the phone or am I?" he asked.

"Oh, you are," the Doctor assured him. "Me, I'm not so good at this phone business. Missed my briefing."

"You didn't have a briefing," the producer said.

"Well, there you are, then."

The producer shook his head and returned to the work at hand. The Doctor did the same. Consequently, the next time the phone rang, roughly five seconds later, he had his hands full and so did the producer. Liz, who was just trying to be helpful by collecting all the pens the producer had misplaced, zipped over to the phone instead. She answered it, pushing the appropriate button to put it onto speakerphone again.

The producer shot her a grateful look before answering, "_Magic School Bus_, producer speaking."

"Oh, good." The girl's voice on the other end of the line sounded relieved—and suspiciously familiar. The Doctor perked his ears up. "I wanted to know how you could justify using aliens as a key plot point. I mean, they don't exist. How can you have everyone just happen to run into one?"

"Oh, I wouldn't put it like that," the Doctor said before the producer could open his mouth. "_I'd_ say it was more an episode exploring the potential out there, wouldn't you? Testing the limits of the imagination?"

There was a brief pause, and then the producer recovered his tongue. "We didn't want to specifically confirm or deny anything in particular. There are stretches in every show, of course, more often for time's or simplicity's sake than not, but the core lessons are always there, and as the Doctor pointed out—"

"It _is_ you!" the girl burst out. "But I thought…. I mean, you didn't _act_…. I know they sometimes have people from the show monitor the phones or call in, but you acted like you didn't even know anything about the show!" With hardly a breath as a pause, she muttered, "And I phoned a different number this time."

The producer shot the Doctor a questioning look, and he shrugged. "She had the wrong number earlier. That's why she wanted me to talk to you about having a show with aliens in it."

The producer stared at him. "But this show just aired. It wasn't even written before you turned up. How—?"

The Doctor grinned. "It's all a bit of a mystery then, isn't it? That's brilliant; I love a good mystery. Of course, I know the answer to this one. Question is, do you?"

Silence. Then came the girl's voice, flat and incredulous. "You've got to be kidding me."

The producer looked at the phone and then back at the Doctor, looking completely baffled.

The Doctor just grinned.

_Fin_

* * *

A/N: I couldn't resist taking it full circle. *grins* Many thanks to everyone who has taken the time to review. I quite appreciated it.


End file.
